A FEW CHANGES TO THIS POST. Altered or added text is in blue.
Transcript.
James Wolcott describes this debate as pitting “President Pet Goat against knight of woeful countenance, John Kerry.” I am gonna so totally steal both of those names.
You don’t get to call it a town hall meeting if its members were chosen by Gallup.
Kerry says he likes the Patriot Act, just not how Ashcroft uses it. That’s not point. The powers available to the government should not be so far-reaching that it matters who the attorney general is. Ashcroft hasn’t abused the powers he was given by the Patriot Act (although he has abused others of his powers), he used them.
Bush says again we had to look at the world differently after 9/11. The other day I saw a book titled “Moral Philosophy After 9/11.” My reaction was that if it’s changed by 9/11 it’s either not philosophy or not moral (I didn’t look inside the book).
Bush: sanctions were not working, the UN not effective in removing Saddam Hussein. Kerry correctly says what I was starting to type, that the objective of the UN was removing WMDs, not removing Saddam. The UN doesn’t get to decide which national leaders are legitimate.
Bush’s tactic seems to be to say the same crap he’s said before, but more vehemently. And then to nod his head vigorously once or twice afterwards--what’s that about?
Bush says the decision to “take Saddam out” was unpopular. I think he means with Europeans. No, on reading the transcript, I can't tell who it was unpopular with, unless "taking Saddam out" mean taking him out on a date...
Also, dissing Arafat was unpopular. I think he means with Palestinians.
Kerry finally challenges the Bush line that his job in the war is to do what the generals tell him (“Of course, I listen to our generals. That's what a president does.”).
Bush called the Internet the “Internets.” Remember his father and checkout scanners?
And then he says that wars can be fought with fewer soldiers, using technology. Technology which is just sorcery to Bush.
Bush: it’s a long, long war. Now he tells us.
Bush: we’ll talk about the tax cut in a minute. Funny, I thought they didn’t know the questions in advance. Of course, what he’s saying is that he’ll talk about tax cuts no matter what the question is.
When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it won’t kill you. Oh, he means to make sure it doesn’t come from the Third World, where drugs by definition are made out of snails, rhino horns, aardvark feces and arsenic.
You can tell he’s in the South, because he just referred to the Yew-nited States Congress.
Bush says Kerry is “running for the president.” The word is presidency, moron. How could you hold the office and not know that? Also, I could swear I heard him call Kerry “Kennedy” earlier. I did.
Bush: “I don’t think the Patriot Act abridges your rights at all.” Also, “I really don't think your rights are being watered down.” Yeah, they're not being watered down, they're being pissed on. And Kerry says we shouldn’t let terrorists change the Constitution. Um, ok.
On stem cells, Shrub says he made the decision to balance science and ethics. Like he thinks science is inherently unethical.
Bush says he wouldn’t appoint a Supreme Court justice who would uphold Dred Scott. Fair to say that Dred Scott won’t be coming up for reconsideration any time soon, but best to be prepared. Or ban “under God” from the pledge of allegiance. Oddly, he insists that those decisions must have derived from personal opinion rather than constitutional interpretation.
Kerry: “It’s never quite as simple as the president would have you believe.”
Asked to give three instances where he made mistakes--and calling for 3 was a wonderful touch--Bush evades. I think that’s a mistake, so to speak, because he’s demonstrated yet again his inability to acknowledge error. He does say some of his appointments were wrong, but he won’t say which ones because he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. Oh brother.
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Friday, October 08, 2004
Are there any brave Afghan men to forcefully take the dirty hands of the crusaders from this innocent Afghan virgin?
Ken Bigley is “executed” (the word the killers used, evidently in the belief that someone would believe this was some sort of judicial process), his head sawn off, while someone filmed. These people are not normal.
I haven’t been talking as much as I should about the details of the intelligence reform bill, which is turning rapidly into a sub rosa version of the Patriot Act II we all feared. In part this was because I have no idea which provisions are likely to pass. I’m not really sure what Congress is capable of, which is frightening by itself, and which bits will quietly die in committee. The provision for deporting people to countries where they were likely to be tortured has been replaced by one allowing the head of Homeland Security to order foreigners detained forever, with no judicial review. There’s something about letting employers have access to arrest--not conviction--records, without punishing them for passing on the info to everyone they know.
Does anyone know of a website with Afghan election posters? I’ve mentioned several of them, but I’ve only been able to read about them. The Guardian reports on a Taliban anti-election poster: “A glossy colour poster juxtaposes photos of charred American corpses swinging from a bridge in Falluja with that of a US soldier apparently frisking a burka-wearing Afghan woman.” It then asks a question that none of those undecided voters in Missouri thought to ask, “Are there any brave Afghan men to forcefully take the dirty hands of the crusaders from this innocent Afghan virgin?”
Muslims in Bangladesh demonstrate against the recent formation of what they call the satanic women’s football league.
Kerry would win in a landslide if he just promised that the long national nightmare of watching Bush smirk would be over
So GeeDubya’s handlers told the cable news networks that he’d be making a major policy speech, conning them into running what was actually a regular campaign speech for an hour (and not one of them pulled the plug?), with lots of little digs at Kerry. Two things occur to me:
1) Isn’t it just adorably deluded that after all this time, Team Chimpy think that what undecided voters need in order to make up their minds is more exposure to...Shrub... speaking?
2) The thing that’s so irritating about those little pauses he takes after he gets off one of those zingers, where he stands there smugly smirking until you want to smack him (if I may alliterate), is that he’s so goddamned self-satisfied about a line he didn’t actually come up with himself, just read off the teleprompter.
I was going to look for a picture of Junior smirking to attach to this post, but I think we’ve all suffered enough.
1) Isn’t it just adorably deluded that after all this time, Team Chimpy think that what undecided voters need in order to make up their minds is more exposure to...Shrub... speaking?
2) The thing that’s so irritating about those little pauses he takes after he gets off one of those zingers, where he stands there smugly smirking until you want to smack him (if I may alliterate), is that he’s so goddamned self-satisfied about a line he didn’t actually come up with himself, just read off the teleprompter.
I was going to look for a picture of Junior smirking to attach to this post, but I think we’ve all suffered enough.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Tie his hands and smear his good name
Creeping jargon alert: I’ve mentioned before the military’s use of the phrase “anti-Iraqi forces” to describe Iraqi insurgents. The NYT parenthetically mentioned today that the phrase has acquired initial caps (Anti-Iraqi Forces) and an acronym (AIF). Now, are the forces anti-Iraqi, or are the forces made up of Anti-Iraqis, possibly traveling here through a dimensional portal from a parallel universe exactly opposite to our own, where Saddam really had WMDs and Spock has a goatee? Because if that’s the case, I think we should be told.
Bush, spinning the Duelfer Report, which says that everything he ever said about Iraq was a lie, claims that it shows that Saddam Hussein was “systematically gaming the system... with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away.” Except that the system couldn’t be “gamed” and the world couldn’t “look away”: the sanctions were imposed by the UN Security Council and could only be removed by the Council, where the US has a veto. The sanctions worked. Bush’s arguments are getting stupider. The strongest retrospective case for invading Iraq, or rather the case they’re pushing now, is that he could have passed WMDs to terrorists, which is not the sort of thing he ever did.
The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin admonere, meaning didn’t do doodly squat)(to quote Cicero) Tom DeLay two more times yesterday, for 1) the appearance that an energy company was buying access to him when he went to a fund-raiser they held on behalf of his PAC while energy legislation was pending. Appearance? That word just covers one of the senses, and it also sounds like that and it smells like...well, let’s just say it smells. And 2) getting the FAA to track down Texas legislators during the redistricting thing. DeLay’s lawyer says--and just to diagram this sentence--“Mr. DeLay has not done a lot that others may not have done,” adding, “It is just that he is under the microscope.” Lord, who would want to look at this under the microscope:
DeLay himself responded to calls by D’s that he step down as House R leader, calling them “relentless personal attacks”--which is just what they are not; they are attacks on his public behaviour--made in an attempt to “tie my hands and smear my good name,” and he already pays a hooker perfectly good money to tie his hands and smear his good name (if you know what I mean) every Tuesday night.
Bush, spinning the Duelfer Report, which says that everything he ever said about Iraq was a lie, claims that it shows that Saddam Hussein was “systematically gaming the system... with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away.” Except that the system couldn’t be “gamed” and the world couldn’t “look away”: the sanctions were imposed by the UN Security Council and could only be removed by the Council, where the US has a veto. The sanctions worked. Bush’s arguments are getting stupider. The strongest retrospective case for invading Iraq, or rather the case they’re pushing now, is that he could have passed WMDs to terrorists, which is not the sort of thing he ever did.
The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin admonere, meaning didn’t do doodly squat)(to quote Cicero) Tom DeLay two more times yesterday, for 1) the appearance that an energy company was buying access to him when he went to a fund-raiser they held on behalf of his PAC while energy legislation was pending. Appearance? That word just covers one of the senses, and it also sounds like that and it smells like...well, let’s just say it smells. And 2) getting the FAA to track down Texas legislators during the redistricting thing. DeLay’s lawyer says--and just to diagram this sentence--“Mr. DeLay has not done a lot that others may not have done,” adding, “It is just that he is under the microscope.” Lord, who would want to look at this under the microscope:
DeLay himself responded to calls by D’s that he step down as House R leader, calling them “relentless personal attacks”--which is just what they are not; they are attacks on his public behaviour--made in an attempt to “tie my hands and smear my good name,” and he already pays a hooker perfectly good money to tie his hands and smear his good name (if you know what I mean) every Tuesday night.
California proposition recommendations
Post-election, I'm adding the results, in this color. Numbers at the secretary of state's site.
I know everyone in California is just waiting for my opinions on the propositions before filling in their absentee ballots. (Everyone else can skip this post: by California standards it’s a remarkably un-wacky election, so find another state to point at and laugh, go away, nothing to see here).
I'd also recommend checking out the SF Bay Guardian's endorsements. And there's also the LA Weekly.
1A & 65 are both about the fiscal relationship between state and local governments, and are therefore important and very dull. Fortunately, 65 has been abandoned, and rightly so--it looks like a mess.1A looks ok to me, mostly protecting local gov finances from more raids by the state and from unfunded mandates, but it’s supported by Governor Ahnuuld, so I’m suspicious and reserve the right to change my mind. (Later: and I have changed my mind, for the reasons the Bay Guardian sets out).
No on 1A & 65.
1A easily passed--Arnold supported it, 65 failed.
Proposition 59 — Guarantees the right of access to state and local government information.
Yes.
Easily passed.
Proposition 60A — Requires that the proceeds from the sale of surplus state property be used to pay off bonded indebtedness.
It's bad budgeting practice to dedicate a revenue source to a completely unrelated purpose. No.
Yes.
Proposition 61 — A $750-million bond issue for constructing, expanding and equipping children’s hospitals.
I’m opposed to bonds on philosophical as well as fiscal grounds. They’re an expensive way of funding something, they’re regressive in that they provide their purchasers an undeserved tax deduction, and place tax obligations on future citizens to pay them off--taxation without representation. No.
Yes.
60 & 62 are evil-twin initiatives and have to be considered together. If both pass, the one that passes with fewest votes won’t be enacted. These are yet more attempts to “reform” primaries. Primaries are in an odd position, constitutionally speaking: they’re slightly less official than other elections because you’re voting to fill a position not in government, but in a political party, which is essentially a voluntary association. The party hacks reminded us of this when they refused to accept two previous initiatives in favor of open primaries, but they still wanted the taxpayers to pay for primaries. After the last round of reapportionment, districts in California (and most of the country) are so solidly partisan that the primary is the only election that matters, which favors ideologues rather than centrists, and leaves you with a choice of whack-jobs in November. And choice is not the word, since there isn't a single competitive race for the US House of Reps in all of California this election. Prop. 62 is an answer to that problem, but not the right answer. It would have a non-partisan (yeah, right) primary, with the 2 top vote-getters facing each other in November. In practice you’d still wind up with a D and an R, with rare exceptions--but no Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom. Even if you don’t vote for candidates in those parties, don’t you feel better about the democratic process just knowing they’re there? In my case, I have a little litmus test that I apply to voting for offices (governor, lite governor, attorney general, judges) that might have something to do with death penalty decisions: I am against the death penalty and feel morally obligated not to vote for supporters of it in those positions. I don't consider that unreasonable. In 20 years of voting in this state, I have never been able to vote for a Democrat for any of those offices applying that standard. Without third-party options, I won't vote. A choice of 2 is no choice. There are better ways to deal with the problems 62 addresses: 1) reform the redistricting process to create more competitive races; 2) if the worry is that a third-party candidate will act as a spoiler, change the November elections, adding, for example, an instant-check-off system. 62 pretends to remove political parties from the election process, but as long as candidates require money and lots of it in order to be viable, the parties will always sneak back in. Prop. 60 enshrines the status quo in which all parties make it onto the final ballot; it is a fairly cynical ploy to preserve party power, but (sigh) vote for it, and against 62.
To my surprise and great relief, that's just what happened, even with the governor's meaty finger on the scales.
Proposition 63 — Levies an additional 1% tax on the income of millionaires to finance expanded mental health services.
Ignore what I said re Prop 60A about bad budgeting. Increasing mental health funding is good, increasing progressivity in taxation is good, so what the hell. Yes.
Yes.
Proposition 64 — Limits an individual’s right to sue under unfair business competition laws to situations in which the individual has suffered actual injury or financial loss because of an unfair practice.
There are definitely cases of lawyers using threats of these lawsuits to blackmail small businesses. Reform is needed. This isn’t it. It would leave enforcement of laws against unfair business practices to the government, which can’t be trusted with it (but has nothing to do with environmental laws, public health, etc as the fear-mongers who wrote the no argument claim. I wish someone would enforce a minimum standard of honesty in these arguments; it’s especially annoying when the legitimate arguments are lost behind the alarmist rhetoric). No on 64.
Yes. Everyone hates a lawsuit.
Proposition 66 — Amends the three-strikes law to require that a crime be a violent or serious felony in order to qualify as a strike and imposes more severe penalties for sexual crimes against children.
The Jean Valjean protection initiative. You have to love how they threw in the sexual crimes against children thing as red meat to balance out the part making 3 Strikes more rational (but not actually rational; that would be too...rational). Some of this would be enacted retroactively, but nowhere near as many people would be released as the No people in the pamphlet, or indeed the governor, have been shamelessly claiming. And while the opposition talk about rapists and murderers being released, by definition anybody affected will have served their time for those crimes and only be in prison now for a non-violent crime. Yes on 66.
No, the public fell for the lies. At least we'll be safe from pizza thieves.
Proposition 67 — Adds a 3% surcharge on telephone usage to provide additional money for hospital emergency services and training.
Ignore what I said about ignoring what I said about bad budgeting. Telephone calls have nothing to do with ERs. No.
No.
Proposition 68 — Requires Indian tribes that own casinos to contribute 25% of their slot machine revenue to state and local governments. If they refuse, 11 card rooms and five horse-racing tracks would gain the right to install 30,000 slots and would pay 33%, or roughly $1 billion a year, primarily to local government.
This is a first, I believe: blackmail enshrined in a proposition. Call this the “You sure got a nice casino, it would sure be a shame if something was to happen to it” initiative. No.
No on both gambling initiatives. I can't tell if we hate gambling, or just Indians.
Proposition 69 — Requires felons to provide a sample of their DNA for storage in a law enforcement database, and authorizes local authorities to take such specimens from individuals arrested on suspicion of rape or murder.
Creepy. It’s even retroactive, applies to some non-felons, to juveniles... DNA tells many things about you that you may not want the government to know, and as the human genome is deciphered, the amount of info will increase. No on 69.
Yes.
Proposition 70 — Grants Indian tribes unlimited casino expansion rights on their land. In return, the tribes would pay the state 8.84% of their net profit.
Unlimited? I think not.
No.
Proposition 71 — Establishes a constitutional right to perform stem-cell research. Authorizes a bond issue of up to $3 billion to finance such research.
Gesture politics at its most gesturey. It will be federal legislation that decides this thing. I like a good gesture as much as the next lefty, but there’s that bond thing, not only because I oppose them philosophically, but because medical research should not be funded by this sort of popularity contest. Including for-profit medical research, I might add--the LA Times says venture capitalists have put up $10 million in support of 71. My advice: don’t vote against it, but don’t vote for it either.
Yes, by nearly 60%.
Proposition 72 — Requires employers to provide healthcare insurance for uninsured workers.
Yes, of course.
No, the fear-mongering about jobs leaving the state worked, paid for mostly by Wal-Mart and the restaurant lobby, which are obviously businesses that can't leave the state. The consolation is that Schwarzenegger will not be able to eat in a restaurant without having his food spit in by the staff.
I know everyone in California is just waiting for my opinions on the propositions before filling in their absentee ballots. (Everyone else can skip this post: by California standards it’s a remarkably un-wacky election, so find another state to point at and laugh, go away, nothing to see here).
I'd also recommend checking out the SF Bay Guardian's endorsements. And there's also the LA Weekly.
1A & 65 are both about the fiscal relationship between state and local governments, and are therefore important and very dull. Fortunately, 65 has been abandoned, and rightly so--it looks like a mess.
No on 1A & 65.
1A easily passed--Arnold supported it, 65 failed.
Proposition 59 — Guarantees the right of access to state and local government information.
Yes.
Easily passed.
Proposition 60A — Requires that the proceeds from the sale of surplus state property be used to pay off bonded indebtedness.
It's bad budgeting practice to dedicate a revenue source to a completely unrelated purpose. No.
Yes.
Proposition 61 — A $750-million bond issue for constructing, expanding and equipping children’s hospitals.
I’m opposed to bonds on philosophical as well as fiscal grounds. They’re an expensive way of funding something, they’re regressive in that they provide their purchasers an undeserved tax deduction, and place tax obligations on future citizens to pay them off--taxation without representation. No.
Yes.
60 & 62 are evil-twin initiatives and have to be considered together. If both pass, the one that passes with fewest votes won’t be enacted. These are yet more attempts to “reform” primaries. Primaries are in an odd position, constitutionally speaking: they’re slightly less official than other elections because you’re voting to fill a position not in government, but in a political party, which is essentially a voluntary association. The party hacks reminded us of this when they refused to accept two previous initiatives in favor of open primaries, but they still wanted the taxpayers to pay for primaries. After the last round of reapportionment, districts in California (and most of the country) are so solidly partisan that the primary is the only election that matters, which favors ideologues rather than centrists, and leaves you with a choice of whack-jobs in November. And choice is not the word, since there isn't a single competitive race for the US House of Reps in all of California this election. Prop. 62 is an answer to that problem, but not the right answer. It would have a non-partisan (yeah, right) primary, with the 2 top vote-getters facing each other in November. In practice you’d still wind up with a D and an R, with rare exceptions--but no Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom. Even if you don’t vote for candidates in those parties, don’t you feel better about the democratic process just knowing they’re there? In my case, I have a little litmus test that I apply to voting for offices (governor, lite governor, attorney general, judges) that might have something to do with death penalty decisions: I am against the death penalty and feel morally obligated not to vote for supporters of it in those positions. I don't consider that unreasonable. In 20 years of voting in this state, I have never been able to vote for a Democrat for any of those offices applying that standard. Without third-party options, I won't vote. A choice of 2 is no choice. There are better ways to deal with the problems 62 addresses: 1) reform the redistricting process to create more competitive races; 2) if the worry is that a third-party candidate will act as a spoiler, change the November elections, adding, for example, an instant-check-off system. 62 pretends to remove political parties from the election process, but as long as candidates require money and lots of it in order to be viable, the parties will always sneak back in. Prop. 60 enshrines the status quo in which all parties make it onto the final ballot; it is a fairly cynical ploy to preserve party power, but (sigh) vote for it, and against 62.
To my surprise and great relief, that's just what happened, even with the governor's meaty finger on the scales.
Proposition 63 — Levies an additional 1% tax on the income of millionaires to finance expanded mental health services.
Ignore what I said re Prop 60A about bad budgeting. Increasing mental health funding is good, increasing progressivity in taxation is good, so what the hell. Yes.
Yes.
Proposition 64 — Limits an individual’s right to sue under unfair business competition laws to situations in which the individual has suffered actual injury or financial loss because of an unfair practice.
There are definitely cases of lawyers using threats of these lawsuits to blackmail small businesses. Reform is needed. This isn’t it. It would leave enforcement of laws against unfair business practices to the government, which can’t be trusted with it (but has nothing to do with environmental laws, public health, etc as the fear-mongers who wrote the no argument claim. I wish someone would enforce a minimum standard of honesty in these arguments; it’s especially annoying when the legitimate arguments are lost behind the alarmist rhetoric). No on 64.
Yes. Everyone hates a lawsuit.
Proposition 66 — Amends the three-strikes law to require that a crime be a violent or serious felony in order to qualify as a strike and imposes more severe penalties for sexual crimes against children.
The Jean Valjean protection initiative. You have to love how they threw in the sexual crimes against children thing as red meat to balance out the part making 3 Strikes more rational (but not actually rational; that would be too...rational). Some of this would be enacted retroactively, but nowhere near as many people would be released as the No people in the pamphlet, or indeed the governor, have been shamelessly claiming. And while the opposition talk about rapists and murderers being released, by definition anybody affected will have served their time for those crimes and only be in prison now for a non-violent crime. Yes on 66.
No, the public fell for the lies. At least we'll be safe from pizza thieves.
Proposition 67 — Adds a 3% surcharge on telephone usage to provide additional money for hospital emergency services and training.
Ignore what I said about ignoring what I said about bad budgeting. Telephone calls have nothing to do with ERs. No.
No.
Proposition 68 — Requires Indian tribes that own casinos to contribute 25% of their slot machine revenue to state and local governments. If they refuse, 11 card rooms and five horse-racing tracks would gain the right to install 30,000 slots and would pay 33%, or roughly $1 billion a year, primarily to local government.
This is a first, I believe: blackmail enshrined in a proposition. Call this the “You sure got a nice casino, it would sure be a shame if something was to happen to it” initiative. No.
No on both gambling initiatives. I can't tell if we hate gambling, or just Indians.
Proposition 69 — Requires felons to provide a sample of their DNA for storage in a law enforcement database, and authorizes local authorities to take such specimens from individuals arrested on suspicion of rape or murder.
Creepy. It’s even retroactive, applies to some non-felons, to juveniles... DNA tells many things about you that you may not want the government to know, and as the human genome is deciphered, the amount of info will increase. No on 69.
Yes.
Proposition 70 — Grants Indian tribes unlimited casino expansion rights on their land. In return, the tribes would pay the state 8.84% of their net profit.
Unlimited? I think not.
No.
Proposition 71 — Establishes a constitutional right to perform stem-cell research. Authorizes a bond issue of up to $3 billion to finance such research.
Gesture politics at its most gesturey. It will be federal legislation that decides this thing. I like a good gesture as much as the next lefty, but there’s that bond thing, not only because I oppose them philosophically, but because medical research should not be funded by this sort of popularity contest. Including for-profit medical research, I might add--the LA Times says venture capitalists have put up $10 million in support of 71. My advice: don’t vote against it, but don’t vote for it either.
Yes, by nearly 60%.
Proposition 72 — Requires employers to provide healthcare insurance for uninsured workers.
Yes, of course.
No, the fear-mongering about jobs leaving the state worked, paid for mostly by Wal-Mart and the restaurant lobby, which are obviously businesses that can't leave the state. The consolation is that Schwarzenegger will not be able to eat in a restaurant without having his food spit in by the staff.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
A post with no politics at all
The South Park people are having trouble with their new movie Team America, because the ratings people want to give them an NC-17 because of a scene of explicit sex between two marionettes.
A 72-year old Malaysian man is getting married for the 53rd time, remarrying his first wife. Sheesh.
For science-as-art, check out the Visions of Science awards, photos of scientific stuff, like this picture of a brain aneurism, with a platinum wire inserted to keep it from spreading.
Substance will always trump spin
Britain’s Channel 4 just aired cockpit footage from an American fighter that bombed civilians in Fallujah in April. He asked mission control whether he should “take them out.” The Indy points out: “At no point during the exchange between the pilot and controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are armed or posing a threat.”
Thought you’d like to see the amusing rhetoric in the email sent by the Bush-Cheney campaign to supporters--and my cat:
Thought you’d like to see the amusing rhetoric in the email sent by the Bush-Cheney campaign to supporters--and my cat:
“Even as one of the nation’s best trial lawyers, Edwards could not explain the inexplicable - the deficiencies of Kerry’s record. Edwards failed as a credible advocate for John Kerry last night and Dick Cheney proved that substance will always trump spin. There’s no evidence that John Kerry has any convictions - despite Edwards’ best attempt at political spin. Every time Edwards had an opportunity to explain John Kerry’s record to the American people, he chose to attack the Vice President, and his low moment came 40 minutes into the debate when a befuddled-looking John Edwards latched onto Halliburton - a political attack proven false by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org.”Befuddled-looking. Love it. So the argument here is that Edwards, I guess because he was a defense lawyer, was supposed to be “defending” Kerry, and it was simply a dirty trick to question Cheney’s record. The article at FactCheck.org is about Kerry ads overstating the significance of the fact that Cheney continues to receive more per year from Halliburton than his VP salary, an issue Edwards never brought up, so the reference is beside the point. Still, they wouldn’t be Republicans if they didn’t leap to the defense of an evil multinational corporation.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Veep debate blogging: What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?
Transcript.
I can’t really tell who “won,” I’m not good at judging those things. Edwards seemed a little glib and shallow. Cheney made no effort to make himself likable, seemed defensive to me, but he might have looked quietly authoritative to people (undecided and/or ignorant voters) who don’t know better. A friend said he looked like he spent 90 minutes trying to take a poop. Wouldn’t it be funny if he really has just been constipated all these years? It would explain a lot.
Certainly, like Bush last week, he looked like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to explain himself or answer questions, felt it was beneath him.
Also, Cheney’s head is twice as big as Edwards’s.
They both stuck closely to just one or two themes, probably too closely, since if you don’t buy the argument, for example, that Iraq and 9/11 aren’t linked, the theme of Bush-Cheney being misleading falls flat.
Cheney said Kerry & Edwards have a very limited view of how to use US force. Like that’s a bad thing.
Cheney cited the El Salvador elections of the 1980s as a model.
Edwards says under Kerry, “we’re going to go back to the proud tradition of the United States of America and presidents of the United States of America for the last 50 to 75 years. First, we’re going to actually tell the American people the truth.” There’s a tradition of telling the American people the truth?
Cheney: If they can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can they stand up to Al Qaida? Yeah, but Howard Dean is scarier (kidding, kidding).
Edwards keeps mentioning Kerry’s name in a question where the rules required him not to. Cheney doesn’t have that problem, and it occurs to me that he doesn’t really respect Bush that much.
Similarly, Edwards was able to refer to Mary Cheney, and the Dickster replied by giving up his turn. I foresee an awkward Thanksgiving.
Gwen Ifill asks, “What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?” Well, as Wonkette would say... no, I won’t go there.
I can’t really tell who “won,” I’m not good at judging those things. Edwards seemed a little glib and shallow. Cheney made no effort to make himself likable, seemed defensive to me, but he might have looked quietly authoritative to people (undecided and/or ignorant voters) who don’t know better. A friend said he looked like he spent 90 minutes trying to take a poop. Wouldn’t it be funny if he really has just been constipated all these years? It would explain a lot.
Certainly, like Bush last week, he looked like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to explain himself or answer questions, felt it was beneath him.
Also, Cheney’s head is twice as big as Edwards’s.
They both stuck closely to just one or two themes, probably too closely, since if you don’t buy the argument, for example, that Iraq and 9/11 aren’t linked, the theme of Bush-Cheney being misleading falls flat.
Cheney said Kerry & Edwards have a very limited view of how to use US force. Like that’s a bad thing.
Cheney cited the El Salvador elections of the 1980s as a model.
Edwards says under Kerry, “we’re going to go back to the proud tradition of the United States of America and presidents of the United States of America for the last 50 to 75 years. First, we’re going to actually tell the American people the truth.” There’s a tradition of telling the American people the truth?
Cheney: If they can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can they stand up to Al Qaida? Yeah, but Howard Dean is scarier (kidding, kidding).
Edwards keeps mentioning Kerry’s name in a question where the rules required him not to. Cheney doesn’t have that problem, and it occurs to me that he doesn’t really respect Bush that much.
Similarly, Edwards was able to refer to Mary Cheney, and the Dickster replied by giving up his turn. I foresee an awkward Thanksgiving.
Gwen Ifill asks, “What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?” Well, as Wonkette would say... no, I won’t go there.
He saw a threat
Dubya is often at his most entertaining not when he’s extemporizing but when he’s on autopilot. Attacking Kerry’s 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, Bush: “In 1991, when my dad was president, he saw a threat, and that was that Saddam Hussein was going to overrun Kuwait.” Gee, what do you think was the first sign of that threat? Oh yeah, when Saddam actually overran Kuwait.
Russian state tv’s (that’s all of them, now) coverage of the Bush-Kerry debate edited out the two candidates’ criticisms of Putin.
The US will give money to something called the Independent Women’s Forum (Lynne Cheney used to be on its board) to train Iraqi women in democratic skills. The IWF’s website says it was “established to combat the women-as-victims, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism.” In the US, that is. The website (iwf.org) seems to be down, but you can use Google’s caches.
Patrick Cockburn points out in a story behind a pay barrier in the Indy that while the US is so gosh-darned proud of capturing Samarra, this is the 3rd time it has done so. Personally I’m assuming that this is just more guerilla warfare stuff, with the insurgents having simply faded away to fight another day. The US conquest of Samarra is thus another “catastrophic success.” Cockburn: “The aim of the bombing is to prove to American voters that their army is on the offensive, but without substantially increasing US casualties.”
“Operation Days of Penitence,” the Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched after two Israeli children were killed by rockets, has so far taken the lives of 22 Palestinian children, because 2 wrongs don’t make a right, but 22 do.
Russian state tv’s (that’s all of them, now) coverage of the Bush-Kerry debate edited out the two candidates’ criticisms of Putin.
The US will give money to something called the Independent Women’s Forum (Lynne Cheney used to be on its board) to train Iraqi women in democratic skills. The IWF’s website says it was “established to combat the women-as-victims, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism.” In the US, that is. The website (iwf.org) seems to be down, but you can use Google’s caches.
Patrick Cockburn points out in a story behind a pay barrier in the Indy that while the US is so gosh-darned proud of capturing Samarra, this is the 3rd time it has done so. Personally I’m assuming that this is just more guerilla warfare stuff, with the insurgents having simply faded away to fight another day. The US conquest of Samarra is thus another “catastrophic success.” Cockburn: “The aim of the bombing is to prove to American voters that their army is on the offensive, but without substantially increasing US casualties.”
“Operation Days of Penitence,” the Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched after two Israeli children were killed by rockets, has so far taken the lives of 22 Palestinian children, because 2 wrongs don’t make a right, but 22 do.
Tippecanoe and Hamid Karzai too
Michael Kostiw will not take the CIA position after all. What he shoplifted turns out not to be lingerie, darn it, but bacon. Maybe he just liked the feel of it when he slipped it down the front of his pants. So the petty theft of a package of delicious bacon now disqualifies someone from a career undermining Latin American democracies, assassinating Fidel Castro and falsifying evidence to support plans to invade Muslim nations.
Speaking of bacon shoved into pants (some segues work better than others), Karzai is still on track to be “elected” president by a country 99.9999% of which he is afraid to set foot on. However today, as a BBC headline puts it, “Karzai Braves Rally Outside Kabul.” In fact, his first campaign event outside Kabul. He bravely travelled 60 miles to Ghazni, bravely accompanied only by a fleet of helicopters, fighter jets, shitloads of soldiers and bodyguards etc. Pretty much like Bush, really.
Speaking of bacon shoved into pants (some segues work better than others), Karzai is still on track to be “elected” president by a country 99.9999% of which he is afraid to set foot on. However today, as a BBC headline puts it, “Karzai Braves Rally Outside Kabul.” In fact, his first campaign event outside Kabul. He bravely travelled 60 miles to Ghazni, bravely accompanied only by a fleet of helicopters, fighter jets, shitloads of soldiers and bodyguards etc. Pretty much like Bush, really.
Monday, October 04, 2004
Out of the business he loved most--bringing about nuclear Armageddon
The pope has beatified the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl I, who approved the use of gas warfare in World War I. Karl I is not to be confused with Austro-Californian Emperor Ahnuuld I, who banned smoking in prisons but likes a good cigar.
(Update: the miracle Karl performed: healed a Brazilian nun’s varicose veins. Almost makes up for the whole poison gas thing. The nun was praying to him in 1960. Why a Brazilian nun was praying to an Austrian emperor, I do not know.)
My cat is on the Bush-Cheney email list. Be warned: they’re recruiting R’s to go door to door on the Oct. 16-17 weekend. So you have plenty of time to dig a mote, fill water balloons, and... I was going to make a joke about showing them your assault rifle, because Republicans love a good assault rifle, but I won’t because neither my cat nor I wish to be visited by the Secret Service.
On CNN, Condi Rice spun Bush’s debate comment that A.Q. Khan had been “brought to justice”: “I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... A.Q. Khan is out of business and he is out of the business that he loved most. And if you don’t think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He’s nationally humiliated.” OK, it’s not George-Bush-during-the-debates nationally humiliated, but it’s still nationally humiliated I suppose.
Since the debate, GeeDubya has been going on and on and on about Kerry’s ill-chosen phrase “global test,” a phrase combining the two things Chimpy hates most: tests, and the world.
(Update: the miracle Karl performed: healed a Brazilian nun’s varicose veins. Almost makes up for the whole poison gas thing. The nun was praying to him in 1960. Why a Brazilian nun was praying to an Austrian emperor, I do not know.)
My cat is on the Bush-Cheney email list. Be warned: they’re recruiting R’s to go door to door on the Oct. 16-17 weekend. So you have plenty of time to dig a mote, fill water balloons, and... I was going to make a joke about showing them your assault rifle, because Republicans love a good assault rifle, but I won’t because neither my cat nor I wish to be visited by the Secret Service.
On CNN, Condi Rice spun Bush’s debate comment that A.Q. Khan had been “brought to justice”: “I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... A.Q. Khan is out of business and he is out of the business that he loved most. And if you don’t think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He’s nationally humiliated.” OK, it’s not George-Bush-during-the-debates nationally humiliated, but it’s still nationally humiliated I suppose.
Since the debate, GeeDubya has been going on and on and on about Kerry’s ill-chosen phrase “global test,” a phrase combining the two things Chimpy hates most: tests, and the world.
Does pork really go over that well in Afghanistan?
More on Afghan elections. This will come as a shocker: Karzai’s opponents accuse the US ambassador of acting as his campaign manager. The Times (reprinted here): “In the past week, the US Ambassador has appeared three times at Mr Karzai’s side at the opening of US-funded reconstruction projects, some of which have not even been completed. ...After two years of doling out meagre reconstruction funds, the Bush Administration has pumped in an extra $ 1.76 billion this election year.” The irony is that Karzai was already a favorite, but the landslide Saturday is going to wind up making him look less legitimate because it will be seen as resulting from American meddling.
Under Bush’s faith-based marriage promotion program, the gov is hiring Moonies and funding Moonie programs. Moonie marriages, of course, are mass marriages between strangers, but those unions produce children free of the taint of original sin, so, uh, good deal.
Under Bush’s faith-based marriage promotion program, the gov is hiring Moonies and funding Moonie programs. Moonie marriages, of course, are mass marriages between strangers, but those unions produce children free of the taint of original sin, so, uh, good deal.
Afghan elections just as silly as ours: let freedom reign
The Sunday Times notes: “Karzai cancelled his last election broadcast because of security concerns although Kabul Radio City, where it was due to be recorded, is less than a mile from the palace and across the road from the headquarters of the Nato led peacekeeping force.” “[T]he 18 candidates include a vodka swilling warlord who likes to crush his enemies with tanks but is running on a human rights platform; a poet returning from exile in Paris; a woman paediatrician and one man who submitted an old black-and-white passport photograph remarkably similar to the only known image of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.” And it’s still a better choice than Bush v. Kerry.
Something called International Foundation for Election Systems is passing out picture-only election literature described thus by the Sunday Times: “a series of pictures begins with a map of Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov at its centre and scenes of devastation. Then pictures of people voting are followed by images of Afghanistan with a sun in the centre radiating out to roads, hospitals, schools and wheat fields.” Yes, by all means encourage magical thinking about the electoral process. And, um, wheat? (If anyone comes across this, or indeed any Afghan election lit., please email me.)
It notes the problems in preventing voter fraud by putting indelible ink on people’s fingers when so many are amputees because of landmines.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
All the bad guys all gone now
The level of lying is increasing. The US is claiming that in Samarra, 125 rebels were killed and no civilians. None. Zero. They’re not even bothering to come up with half-plausible lies anymore. Area hospitals of course tell a different story. The Iraqi interior minister also tells a story, a children’s story to judge by the vocabulary: “We cleaned up the city from all the bad guys and terrorists.”
David Avery, running the Afghan presidential elections for the UN, says that there will be many irregularities, but not enough to undercut their legitimacy or affect the outcome. Of course the elections and the irregularities haven’t happened yet, so Avery is obviously prepared to overlook any amount of violence or chicanery.
Yes, I used the word chicanery. Everybody should use the word chicanery once in their lifetime.
When the Germans occupied France, they set up an internment camp. It was kept going secretly until 1949, evidently mostly housing foreigners it would have been embarrassing to release because to do so would be to admit that French guards had collaborated with the Germans. So the French government effectively kept collaborating with Nazis who were no longer there because they had been defeated 4 years before. Shows real dedication to the fine art of collaboration.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza (the 5,934th invasion, I believe) is being called Operation Days of Penitence, which just seems obnoxious to me.
Tim Dunlop is right: the voices that wouldn’t let Bush finish were not in an earpiece, they were the voices in his chimp-like head.
David Avery, running the Afghan presidential elections for the UN, says that there will be many irregularities, but not enough to undercut their legitimacy or affect the outcome. Of course the elections and the irregularities haven’t happened yet, so Avery is obviously prepared to overlook any amount of violence or chicanery.
Yes, I used the word chicanery. Everybody should use the word chicanery once in their lifetime.
When the Germans occupied France, they set up an internment camp. It was kept going secretly until 1949, evidently mostly housing foreigners it would have been embarrassing to release because to do so would be to admit that French guards had collaborated with the Germans. So the French government effectively kept collaborating with Nazis who were no longer there because they had been defeated 4 years before. Shows real dedication to the fine art of collaboration.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza (the 5,934th invasion, I believe) is being called Operation Days of Penitence, which just seems obnoxious to me.
Tim Dunlop is right: the voices that wouldn’t let Bush finish were not in an earpiece, they were the voices in his chimp-like head.
Saturday, October 02, 2004
Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan
The UN is funding PR advisers to teach the candidates in the Afghan presidential elections the finer points of spin-doctoring.
Badly chosen BBC headline: “Nigeria Spearheads Polio Campaign.” Glad to find that it didn’t involve actual spears. Given the obscurantism in some of the Muslim states, this would not be out of the question. This time President Obasanjo himself personally administered the vaccine to the daughter of the governor of Kano, one of the states that had previously banned the vaccine.
Porter Goss has picked as executive director of the CIA a guy, Michael Kostiw, who was an oil company lobbyist--natch--after he was forced out of the CIA in 1981 for shoplifting. Well, for getting caught shoplifting, anyway. Hopefully the Post won’t stop investigating until it can tell us exactly what he shoplifted, but somehow I think we all know it was women’s underwear.
(Update: pink women’s underwear, no doubt in my mind)
Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was an important issue. In fact, Bush said US spending had gone up by I think he said 30%. Turns out, that includes the cost of getting rid of the US’s own unwanted nuclear materials. This means he came prepared with a fake number, on an issue he claimed to consider really important.
The Spanish government is moving forward with plans to allow gay marriage and gay adoption. The Vatican calls this a “sad step.” Yes, and we should listen because the Catholic Church’s record of social policy in Spain is so good:
Gen. Dostum, a whisky-drinking mujahideen leader whose Northern Alliance forces helped defeat the Taliban, had to be dissuaded from posing for a campaign poster among the graves of "martyrs" who died fighting the Taliban.The UN, according to the Observer, has 115,000 election officials in Afghanistan, with 5,000 satellite phones, 1,150 jeeps and 4 helicopters. Also donkeys: some of the ballot boxes will be sent by donkey. Meanwhile, in Iraq, they have 8 people working on the elections. Not that the 115,000 officials etc aren’t working in the service of a farce, of course. It would help keep everyone’s understanding of this focused if the media used language more carefully. For example, The Observer says that “More than 10 million voters have registered,” but since there are fewer than 10 million eligible voters in the whole country, so that statement is false, disregarding the large and unknown level of fraud.
Tactfully, they pointed out that he might look for a more positive image. “Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan,” Mr Marie said. The general eventually agreed to pose at a building site instead.
Badly chosen BBC headline: “Nigeria Spearheads Polio Campaign.” Glad to find that it didn’t involve actual spears. Given the obscurantism in some of the Muslim states, this would not be out of the question. This time President Obasanjo himself personally administered the vaccine to the daughter of the governor of Kano, one of the states that had previously banned the vaccine.
Porter Goss has picked as executive director of the CIA a guy, Michael Kostiw, who was an oil company lobbyist--natch--after he was forced out of the CIA in 1981 for shoplifting. Well, for getting caught shoplifting, anyway. Hopefully the Post won’t stop investigating until it can tell us exactly what he shoplifted, but somehow I think we all know it was women’s underwear.
(Update: pink women’s underwear, no doubt in my mind)
Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was an important issue. In fact, Bush said US spending had gone up by I think he said 30%. Turns out, that includes the cost of getting rid of the US’s own unwanted nuclear materials. This means he came prepared with a fake number, on an issue he claimed to consider really important.
The Spanish government is moving forward with plans to allow gay marriage and gay adoption. The Vatican calls this a “sad step.” Yes, and we should listen because the Catholic Church’s record of social policy in Spain is so good:
Never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant
A 1977 patent for the comb-over (don’t miss the drawings), via the 2004 IgNobel prizes.
Contrariwise, a French Muslim schoolgirl shaved her head to protest the headscarf ban, just as I suggested.
Bush keeps making fun of Kerry’s plan to call a summit on Iraq: “I’ve never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant, or bring a terrorist to justice.” Then open a history book, you ignoramus:
Contrariwise, a French Muslim schoolgirl shaved her head to protest the headscarf ban, just as I suggested.
Bush keeps making fun of Kerry’s plan to call a summit on Iraq: “I’ve never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant, or bring a terrorist to justice.” Then open a history book, you ignoramus:
We'll be bombing ya tamarrah, Samarrah
Bill Maher says the FCC is upset about the televising of the debates, because they showed the emperor without clothes.
DO AS WE SAY... : Two BBC website stories: 1) “US pushes to take Iraq rebel town: More than 100 people die as US and Iraqi forces launch a major attack to regain control of the town of Samarra.” 2) “US urges Israel to show restraint: Washington calls on Israel to limit its offensive in the Gaza Strip, as tanks move deep into militant strongholds.”
The Samarra operation’s raison d’être is to allow it to participate in the demonstration elections (a phrase coined by leftists in the 1980s for the hilariously fake elections Reagan ordered be held in El Salvador and Honduras, which I’m happy to see coming back into widespread use) in January. In the debates, Shrub castigated Kerry for allegedly setting a deadline for leaving Iraq, but his Iraq policy is being distorted to pull off a meaningless “election.” The descriptions of the Samarra campaign by American military types suggests not just a counter-insurgency, but a coup: the WaPo quotes an Army spokesmodel: “We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective.” By ineffective, he means not enforcing American diktats.
DO AS WE SAY... : Two BBC website stories: 1) “US pushes to take Iraq rebel town: More than 100 people die as US and Iraqi forces launch a major attack to regain control of the town of Samarra.” 2) “US urges Israel to show restraint: Washington calls on Israel to limit its offensive in the Gaza Strip, as tanks move deep into militant strongholds.”
The Samarra operation’s raison d’être is to allow it to participate in the demonstration elections (a phrase coined by leftists in the 1980s for the hilariously fake elections Reagan ordered be held in El Salvador and Honduras, which I’m happy to see coming back into widespread use) in January. In the debates, Shrub castigated Kerry for allegedly setting a deadline for leaving Iraq, but his Iraq policy is being distorted to pull off a meaningless “election.” The descriptions of the Samarra campaign by American military types suggests not just a counter-insurgency, but a coup: the WaPo quotes an Army spokesmodel: “We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective.” By ineffective, he means not enforcing American diktats.
Friday, October 01, 2004
September the 11th been very, very good to me
The debate has brought out the urge of many people to illustrate it or write parodies.
Augusto Pinochet may finally be taken down, not for disappearing hundreds or thousands of members of the opposition, but for not paying his taxes. Well, if it’s good enough for Al Capone...
Putin now also plans to take control of the body that appoints, disciplines and removes judges.
The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin word admonere, meaning to moderately chide someone with no sense of shame) Tom DeLay for having tried to bribe (I’m using the term in its legal sense) Rep. Nick Smith, offering to support his son’s run for Congress if he voted for the Medicare drug bill. DeLay issued a statement noting that the committee hadn’t previously addressed such conduct, so how could he possibly have known that bribery was unethical?
DeLay is also proud of the House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, because it’s more important for DC residents to have a gun than a vote.
Augusto Pinochet may finally be taken down, not for disappearing hundreds or thousands of members of the opposition, but for not paying his taxes. Well, if it’s good enough for Al Capone...
Putin now also plans to take control of the body that appoints, disciplines and removes judges.
The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin word admonere, meaning to moderately chide someone with no sense of shame) Tom DeLay for having tried to bribe (I’m using the term in its legal sense) Rep. Nick Smith, offering to support his son’s run for Congress if he voted for the Medicare drug bill. DeLay issued a statement noting that the committee hadn’t previously addressed such conduct, so how could he possibly have known that bribery was unethical?
DeLay is also proud of the House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, because it’s more important for DC residents to have a gun than a vote.
Impertinent
The Official God FAQ.
Responding to the new video of hostage Ken Bigley, Comical Allawi called the kidnapping “impertinent.” That’ll put ‘em in their place. But what he really dislikes is the fact that the Western media air the videos.
Bush: “The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.” Actually, Khan was pardoned after making a confession that he did it all, without anyone in the government knowing anything about it and...and here’s the part everyone always leaves out...he was allowed to keep all the money he made!
Evidently, watching the debate on PBS as I did was the equivalent of listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio. Where my weak impression (which is why I didn’t declare a winner in the last post) was that Kerry had probably lost the debate, everyone else whose opinion I’ve since read online watched it on C-SPAN, which evidently often ran a split-screen, and they thought Bush looked irritated, the down-market version of Gore’s 2000 debate performance (like Gore, he seems to feel his opponent is beneath him or that he is above having to debate when he is self-evidently superior). The problem is, most of America didn’t watch it on C-SPAN. The other question is how many of the oh-so-important undecided voters watched the whole debate. As I said, Bush came with only 30 minutes of material, and so looked less and less competent as the debate went on.
(Update: Actually, this lovely two-minute clip of Bush squirming and rolling his eyes while Kerry was speaking comes from ABC.)
Responding to the new video of hostage Ken Bigley, Comical Allawi called the kidnapping “impertinent.” That’ll put ‘em in their place. But what he really dislikes is the fact that the Western media air the videos.
Bush: “The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.” Actually, Khan was pardoned after making a confession that he did it all, without anyone in the government knowing anything about it and...and here’s the part everyone always leaves out...he was allowed to keep all the money he made!
Evidently, watching the debate on PBS as I did was the equivalent of listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio. Where my weak impression (which is why I didn’t declare a winner in the last post) was that Kerry had probably lost the debate, everyone else whose opinion I’ve since read online watched it on C-SPAN, which evidently often ran a split-screen, and they thought Bush looked irritated, the down-market version of Gore’s 2000 debate performance (like Gore, he seems to feel his opponent is beneath him or that he is above having to debate when he is self-evidently superior). The problem is, most of America didn’t watch it on C-SPAN. The other question is how many of the oh-so-important undecided voters watched the whole debate. As I said, Bush came with only 30 minutes of material, and so looked less and less competent as the debate went on.
(Update: Actually, this lovely two-minute clip of Bush squirming and rolling his eyes while Kerry was speaking comes from ABC.)
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Bush-Kerry debate blogging: it’s hard work, but I’ll try not to send mexed missages
Kerry: “I’ve never wilted in my life.” I think I’ll leave the response to that line to Wonkette.
Kerry says the biggest danger in the world is nuclear proliferation, and although he makes a good case for it and I don’t disagree, we all know he just wanted to force Bush to try to pronounce the phrase. We know his problems with nukyular, and proliferation is at least two syllables beyond Shrub’s comfort zone (he did try “vociferously” at one point, but he didn’t use it correctly)(to be fair, Kerry early on warned about “radical Islamic Muslims”).
Notably, Bush tried to reshape that issue, as if nuclear proliferation only mattered in terms of terrorists getting their hands on nukes.
The guys controlling the cameras (Fox, actually) did occasionally show reaction shots in violation of the agreement between the campaigns. But not enough. Kerry started one response, “the president just said something extraordinarily revealing.” I’d have loved to see the look on GeeDubya’s face, since saying something revealing was the last thing he wanted to do. The revealing thing was “the enemy attacked us” as an excuse for invading Iraq; Kerry was going after Bush for conflating Al Qaida and Iraq, or, as Kerry phrased it, copying Bush’s annoying tendency to personalize foreign policy, Osama and Saddam. Bush’s response: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.” Well, I’m reassured.
Bush came to the 90-minute debate with enough prepared material for 30 minutes. He wasn’t just on message, he was on repeat. No doubt someone is doing a word count, but he kept saying “it’s hard work” about various things [Update: 11 times], presumably to indicate that he doesn’t spend all his time clearing brush in Crawford and leaving the work to other people. It just occurred to me that other people were barely mentioned. Powell was, but shouldn’t Kerry have been pounding on Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc?
Another phrase Bush used over and over and over was “mixed messages” (or mexed missages, in one case). Evidently you can’t lead if you give mixed messages. For someone who speaks as if he has no first language, he places a great deal of faith in the power of words. The suggestion seems to be that other countries, and American troops, are so unsophisticated that any deviation from the script will demoralize. “Not in front of the children” is the message.
Joe Lockhart is spinning that Shrub had an “annoyed smirk,” whatever that might be.
Kerry says the biggest danger in the world is nuclear proliferation, and although he makes a good case for it and I don’t disagree, we all know he just wanted to force Bush to try to pronounce the phrase. We know his problems with nukyular, and proliferation is at least two syllables beyond Shrub’s comfort zone (he did try “vociferously” at one point, but he didn’t use it correctly)(to be fair, Kerry early on warned about “radical Islamic Muslims”).
Notably, Bush tried to reshape that issue, as if nuclear proliferation only mattered in terms of terrorists getting their hands on nukes.
The guys controlling the cameras (Fox, actually) did occasionally show reaction shots in violation of the agreement between the campaigns. But not enough. Kerry started one response, “the president just said something extraordinarily revealing.” I’d have loved to see the look on GeeDubya’s face, since saying something revealing was the last thing he wanted to do. The revealing thing was “the enemy attacked us” as an excuse for invading Iraq; Kerry was going after Bush for conflating Al Qaida and Iraq, or, as Kerry phrased it, copying Bush’s annoying tendency to personalize foreign policy, Osama and Saddam. Bush’s response: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.” Well, I’m reassured.
Bush came to the 90-minute debate with enough prepared material for 30 minutes. He wasn’t just on message, he was on repeat. No doubt someone is doing a word count, but he kept saying “it’s hard work” about various things [Update: 11 times], presumably to indicate that he doesn’t spend all his time clearing brush in Crawford and leaving the work to other people. It just occurred to me that other people were barely mentioned. Powell was, but shouldn’t Kerry have been pounding on Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc?
Another phrase Bush used over and over and over was “mixed messages” (or mexed missages, in one case). Evidently you can’t lead if you give mixed messages. For someone who speaks as if he has no first language, he places a great deal of faith in the power of words. The suggestion seems to be that other countries, and American troops, are so unsophisticated that any deviation from the script will demoralize. “Not in front of the children” is the message.
Joe Lockhart is spinning that Shrub had an “annoyed smirk,” whatever that might be.
Rich cultural heritages
It was only a matter of time: www.kerryhatersforkerry.com
The trial on sex charges of the majority of adult males on Pitcairn Island, a place so far from anything that no plane can reach it, has begun, and I’m disappointed. I’d always heard that the descendants of the Bounty mutineers spoke with 18th-century accents, but hadn’t heard any actually speak until the BBC news yesterday. The women interviewed had only a mild accent, vaguely Australiany, not at all how I imagined Pitt the Younger and Daniel Defoe speaking. Pitcairn, which already has too few people to be really viable as an economy (or, indeed, a gene-pool, if you catch my drift), will become a ghost island if the men are convicted. They insist that having sex with 11-year old girls is part of their rich cultural heritage.
While the Italian government has been issuing non-denials about paying ransom for 2 women hostages in Iraq. The ransom was reputed to be one million American dollars, so the US has had some cultural influence on Iraq after all. Italian politicians, newspapers and polls have all said, So what? You’d think a country with a rich cultural heritage of kidnappings would know so what.
The trial on sex charges of the majority of adult males on Pitcairn Island, a place so far from anything that no plane can reach it, has begun, and I’m disappointed. I’d always heard that the descendants of the Bounty mutineers spoke with 18th-century accents, but hadn’t heard any actually speak until the BBC news yesterday. The women interviewed had only a mild accent, vaguely Australiany, not at all how I imagined Pitt the Younger and Daniel Defoe speaking. Pitcairn, which already has too few people to be really viable as an economy (or, indeed, a gene-pool, if you catch my drift), will become a ghost island if the men are convicted. They insist that having sex with 11-year old girls is part of their rich cultural heritage.
While the Italian government has been issuing non-denials about paying ransom for 2 women hostages in Iraq. The ransom was reputed to be one million American dollars, so the US has had some cultural influence on Iraq after all. Italian politicians, newspapers and polls have all said, So what? You’d think a country with a rich cultural heritage of kidnappings would know so what.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Uplifting accounts with good news messages
There are times when I despair of this country. The R’s try to sneak a provision into the omnibus intelligence restructuring bill to allow any non-citizen, without trial or hearing, to be turned over to countries that are likely to (or asked to) torture them. And in the House Judiciary Committee, the vote was along party lines. A vote in favor of torture, in favor of violating international laws and American due process, and the vote is determined by no higher principle than partisan freaking politics. And in the new favorite tactic of the right, American courts would be deprived of the ability to overturn the rules governing “rendition.” And just to ensure there isn’t a constitutional protection unviolated, it will apply retroactively. And people could be sent to any country we feel like sending them to, whether they were born there or had ever set foot there in their lives.
WaPo headline: “U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict.” By, among other things, censoring reports about the increasing violence. Congress won’t even get them anymore. I assume the headline is sarcastic, or something. The Pentagon will also pay for Iraqi-Americans and the CPA officials who did such a wonderful job getting Iraq back on its feet, to deliver “uplifting accounts with good news messages” at military bases--here in the US, not in Iraq, they’re not complete idiots--where soldiers will be encouraged to attend “voluntarily” and to refrain from asking, “So if Iraq is so great now, when are you moving back?”
WaPo headline: “U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict.” By, among other things, censoring reports about the increasing violence. Congress won’t even get them anymore. I assume the headline is sarcastic, or something. The Pentagon will also pay for Iraqi-Americans and the CPA officials who did such a wonderful job getting Iraq back on its feet, to deliver “uplifting accounts with good news messages” at military bases--here in the US, not in Iraq, they’re not complete idiots--where soldiers will be encouraged to attend “voluntarily” and to refrain from asking, “So if Iraq is so great now, when are you moving back?”
Chain of Command
One of the rules in the 32 pages of rules for tomorrow’s debate is that when one candidate is speaking, the camera will not show the other candidate--looking at his watch like Bush the Elder, sighing like Al Gore, sweating like Nixon. Of course there is no reason for the networks to abide by this agreement between the two candidates.
Seymour Hersh will be on the Daily Show tonight. I finished his book Chain of Command a couple of days ago, but have held off writing about it, because while it is a pretty good if uneven book, it didn’t add that much to what I already knew. Of course I’m a blogger and by definition know everything, and had already read the New Yorker articles that form the basis of much of the book, and that might be the same for many of my readers as well. I also wasn’t thrilled with all the good quotes being anonymous.
Hersh doesn’t go into much detail about the actual torture of prisoners. In fact, given the importance of the pictures in giving this story the traction it has had, it’s interesting that the book has no pictures. Hersh’s main purpose is to demonstrate the culpability of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc in the torture of prisoners from Guantanamo through Abu Ghraib. If you’re not convinced, definitely read the book. He also throws in material, some of it a little cursory, on many of the failures of intelligence and wrong-headed foreign policy of the Bush admin, adding up to a thesis that they tend to see what they want to see. In his last sentences, Hersh wonders whether Bush is actually a big ol’ liar:
“But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.”It was funny to read that, since I’ve been speculating recently myself (in the lead paragraphs of this and this post)
about Bush’s relationship to the words he uses, if any.
Bush’s relationship to logic and evidence is another matter. During the 2000 campaign, those of us who had contempt for the man’s intellectual capacities assumed that he understood how ignorant and incompetent he was. It was really the only reassuring assumption to make, since it meant he would leave the decisions to smarter people. As Colin Powell has found out, this has not been the case, because Bush--this is what we failed to understand--thinks of himself as wise. Facts are secondary to him.
I didn’t really understand this until early in 2002. A month or so after the State of the Union address in which he referred to the “axis of evil,” he was in South Korea. I saw him on television talking about something he’d just heard, which was that in North Korea there was a peace museum in which was displayed an ax with which a NK soldier had killed two American soldiers. In a peace museum, was Bush’s point. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said. That sentence involved a reversal of deductive reasoning: he was pleased to be able to show evidence in support of what he already believed. In normal logic, the evidence comes first. But for Bush, facts are, as Ronald Reagan once said, stupid things. A real man derives his understanding of people and events from his “character” rather than his intellect. Bush can, he believes, look into Putin’s eyes and understand his soul.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
If you wanted perfection
Missed one: kerrywrongforevangelicals.com. Identical to wrong for Catholics, which is identical to wrong for Mormons.
See if this sounds familiar: Secretary of War Donald “What, me worry?” Rumsfeld
is quoted in a WaPo article on Star Wars, explaining why the US will deploy a system that won’t work: “Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship? I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.’” Yes, that’s just what he said about Iraqi elections. The article mentions that he used to be a pharmaceuticals exec: be afraid.
Followup on handshakes: the Guardian, in an article on the subject, says that Prince Charles refused to shake Idi Amin’s hand in 1978, that Helmut Kohl refused to shake PW Botha’s in 1984, and Fidel Castro believed that the CIA intended to poison him through a handshake, which isn’t sillier than anything else they tried, and so kept a cigar in his hand as an excuse.
Bumper sticker: Osama still has his job. Do you still have yours?
Russia is dealing with the danger of Beslan-type incidents in schools: all schoolchildren will now wear dog tags, “designed to withstand a fire or bomb blast.” I suppose it’s still better than “duck and cover.”
See if this sounds familiar: Secretary of War Donald “What, me worry?” Rumsfeld
is quoted in a WaPo article on Star Wars, explaining why the US will deploy a system that won’t work: “Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship? I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.’” Yes, that’s just what he said about Iraqi elections. The article mentions that he used to be a pharmaceuticals exec: be afraid.
Followup on handshakes: the Guardian, in an article on the subject, says that Prince Charles refused to shake Idi Amin’s hand in 1978, that Helmut Kohl refused to shake PW Botha’s in 1984, and Fidel Castro believed that the CIA intended to poison him through a handshake, which isn’t sillier than anything else they tried, and so kept a cigar in his hand as an excuse.
Bumper sticker: Osama still has his job. Do you still have yours?
Russia is dealing with the danger of Beslan-type incidents in schools: all schoolchildren will now wear dog tags, “designed to withstand a fire or bomb blast.” I suppose it’s still better than “duck and cover.”
No American pressure behind the handshake
I have a theory. Colin Powell said Sunday about the Iraqi insurgency: “Yes, it’s getting worse, and the reason it’s getting worse is that they’re determined to disrupt the election.” My theory: what if the reason the Bushies are insisting on a totally unrealistic deadline for sham elections is to provide just this excuse for their failure to get the insurgency under control?
Allawi is now under pressure to apologize for shaking the Israeli foreign minister’s hand. “Allawi said there was no American pressure behind the handshake.” Sounds like my mother reminding me to write thank-you notes. Yesterday I commented about political handshakes. I think that in the secret religion shared by all politicians, a handshake can steal your soul, like cameras for some Native American tribes.
Google has set up a news.google in Chinese, but searches won’t display the sites the Chinese government doesn’t like. Google says it’s just efficient not to show a lot of links that will just be blocked to Chinese internet users anyway.
Allawi is now under pressure to apologize for shaking the Israeli foreign minister’s hand. “Allawi said there was no American pressure behind the handshake.” Sounds like my mother reminding me to write thank-you notes. Yesterday I commented about political handshakes. I think that in the secret religion shared by all politicians, a handshake can steal your soul, like cameras for some Native American tribes.
Google has set up a news.google in Chinese, but searches won’t display the sites the Chinese government doesn’t like. Google says it’s just efficient not to show a lot of links that will just be blocked to Chinese internet users anyway.
No concern for the Iraqi people
The Department of Homeland Security is buying a town, Playas, New Mexico, a former mining town with only 50 residents remaining, from its owner, Phelps Dodge, to use for practicing responses to suicide bombings, anthrax attacks, poisonings of water supplies, etc. Try not to think of this as a metaphor.
Life should be interesting for the 50 residents.
When the US government, after first trying to pretend that Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was some sort of terrorist-symp, changed excuses to claim that the problem was a misspelling, I was going to make a joke about the government not being able to handle C-A-T, but decided it was too obvious. But there’s a real issue here.
It was the Yusuf bit they had problems with, of course. Three years after 9/11, when several men who weren’t supposed to have been allowed into the country got onto planes they also shouldn’t have been allowed on because the gov didn’t have a standard for transliterating from Arabic, they still haven’t fixed the problem. Now we hear that there’s a huge and growing backlog of tapes not being translated from what the NYT calls “languages commonly associated with terrorism” by the FBI (motto: Terrorist Not Spoken Here). The reason they don’t learn from their hideous mistakes is that there are no consequences for their major intelligence failures (other than 2,900 dead on 9/11/01, I mean). Also: stop recording every conversation spoken in Arabic anywhere in the world. They’re not all terrorists. Really.
Colin Powell says the “major thrust” of US military efforts in Iraq in the near future (i.e., after the US election) will be to go into “no go” areas. You know who might have an opinion on this? A guy whose entire mission in another war was to take a boat up a river for no other reason than to show that there were no areas the US military couldn’t go?
Uh, Kerry. We were all clear on that, right?
The LA Times article that provided the Powell quote contains several instances of US military assholery related to aerial bombardment of Sadr City. The US talks about a “precision strike”...that lasted for hours. Army spokesmodel Lt. Col. Jim Hutton blamed casualties on insurgent mortars, saying “The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people.” Did I mention we just bombed a crowded suburb of Baghdad for several hours? Another spokesmodel called reports of civilians killed by bombing in Fallujah “propaganda,” and “suggested that local hospitals had been infiltrated by insurgent forces.” Please, just fucking spare me.
Life should be interesting for the 50 residents.
When the US government, after first trying to pretend that Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was some sort of terrorist-symp, changed excuses to claim that the problem was a misspelling, I was going to make a joke about the government not being able to handle C-A-T, but decided it was too obvious. But there’s a real issue here.
It was the Yusuf bit they had problems with, of course. Three years after 9/11, when several men who weren’t supposed to have been allowed into the country got onto planes they also shouldn’t have been allowed on because the gov didn’t have a standard for transliterating from Arabic, they still haven’t fixed the problem. Now we hear that there’s a huge and growing backlog of tapes not being translated from what the NYT calls “languages commonly associated with terrorism” by the FBI (motto: Terrorist Not Spoken Here). The reason they don’t learn from their hideous mistakes is that there are no consequences for their major intelligence failures (other than 2,900 dead on 9/11/01, I mean). Also: stop recording every conversation spoken in Arabic anywhere in the world. They’re not all terrorists. Really.
Colin Powell says the “major thrust” of US military efforts in Iraq in the near future (i.e., after the US election) will be to go into “no go” areas. You know who might have an opinion on this? A guy whose entire mission in another war was to take a boat up a river for no other reason than to show that there were no areas the US military couldn’t go?
Uh, Kerry. We were all clear on that, right?
The LA Times article that provided the Powell quote contains several instances of US military assholery related to aerial bombardment of Sadr City. The US talks about a “precision strike”...that lasted for hours. Army spokesmodel Lt. Col. Jim Hutton blamed casualties on insurgent mortars, saying “The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people.” Did I mention we just bombed a crowded suburb of Baghdad for several hours? Another spokesmodel called reports of civilians killed by bombing in Fallujah “propaganda,” and “suggested that local hospitals had been infiltrated by insurgent forces.” Please, just fucking spare me.
Monday, September 27, 2004
But is he good for the Zoroastrians?
The Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, which is a serious center of learning in economics & stats, really, suspended classes because students were complaining about a ghost.
Yesterday I posted a link to www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com. Guess what I found today: www.kerrywrongformormons.com. They’re word-for-word identical because, Mormons, Catholics, pretty much the same thing, right? Those are evidently the only religions Kerry’s bad for, because there’s no kerrywrongformuslims.com, or kerrywrongforjews.com, or kerrywrongforsatanworshippers.com. Yet. Consider that a hint to anyone with the inclination to write a parody.
From the Daily Telegraph: “Poland’s state railway is claiming £320 compensation from a man who delayed services by being run over by a train. But the company said yesterday it may relent after learning that his house had burned down. ‘We are acting in accordance with article 415,’ said a spokesman. Pawel Banaszek, 19, who was paralysed in the incident, said he was beaten by a gang and left on the track. He would pay the compensation from disability allowance.”
The British foreign minister accidentally shook the hand of Zimbabwean dictator at a reception in NY last week, to his embarrassment (there’s a long description in Clinton’s memoirs of the lengths he went to to avoid being filmed shaking Arafat’s hand)(and the rules for the Bush-Kerry debates make a handshake mandatory). Still, let’s not bring race into it (Indy headline: “Straw Shook Mugabe’s Hand ‘Because It Was Dark’”). Oh, wait, they meant the room was dark.
Yesterday I posted a link to www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com. Guess what I found today: www.kerrywrongformormons.com. They’re word-for-word identical because, Mormons, Catholics, pretty much the same thing, right? Those are evidently the only religions Kerry’s bad for, because there’s no kerrywrongformuslims.com, or kerrywrongforjews.com, or kerrywrongforsatanworshippers.com. Yet. Consider that a hint to anyone with the inclination to write a parody.
From the Daily Telegraph: “Poland’s state railway is claiming £320 compensation from a man who delayed services by being run over by a train. But the company said yesterday it may relent after learning that his house had burned down. ‘We are acting in accordance with article 415,’ said a spokesman. Pawel Banaszek, 19, who was paralysed in the incident, said he was beaten by a gang and left on the track. He would pay the compensation from disability allowance.”
The British foreign minister accidentally shook the hand of Zimbabwean dictator at a reception in NY last week, to his embarrassment (there’s a long description in Clinton’s memoirs of the lengths he went to to avoid being filmed shaking Arafat’s hand)(and the rules for the Bush-Kerry debates make a handshake mandatory). Still, let’s not bring race into it (Indy headline: “Straw Shook Mugabe’s Hand ‘Because It Was Dark’”). Oh, wait, they meant the room was dark.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Free at last, free at last, to practice naked yoga in public
San Francisco prosecutors have dropped public nuisance charges against “Naked Yoga Guy,” having decided that naked yoga is not illegal in the city. Plan your vacations accordingly.
Time magazine claims that the Bushies dropped a plan for the CIA to “aid candidates favored by Washington” in the Iraqi elections, after getting negative reactions from several congresscritters (the article condescendingly refers to Nancy Pelosi, who come to think of it is Naked Yoga Guy’s representative, as coming “unglued” over it). I know I’m reassured.
I’m also reassured by the US ambassador to Afghanistan’s denial that he pressured rival candidates to Karzai to quit the race.
In the Iraq story, Time says the Bushies considered that intervention in the elections was justified as a counter-balance to Iranian resources. Because an election that was unfair when one foreign nation is trying to influence it becomes completely fair when two foreign nations are doing so. And by the way, the reason I put “aid candidates favored by Washington” in quotes is that Iraqis will be voting for parties, not for candidates. The Time piece shows a total ignorance of the electoral system the US foisted on Iraq.
(Update: Juan Cole has made all those points about the Time story at greater length and with greater expertise, although a day later.)
Everybody reports on Turkey’s revision of its criminal justice code, which were largely in a liberal direction in the hopes of getting EU membership. Since that isn’t gonna happen, I worry about what will happen when the day finally comes that Turkey realizes it isn’t gonna happen. Will they re-criminalize adultery? Reinstitute lesser penalties for rape if the man marries his victim and greater ones for rape of a virgin? Probably not, but it would have better had they come to this on their own. Only the Daily Telegraph, that I can find, mentions, in rather vague terms, something about restricting discussion of issues such as the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Time magazine claims that the Bushies dropped a plan for the CIA to “aid candidates favored by Washington” in the Iraqi elections, after getting negative reactions from several congresscritters (the article condescendingly refers to Nancy Pelosi, who come to think of it is Naked Yoga Guy’s representative, as coming “unglued” over it). I know I’m reassured.
I’m also reassured by the US ambassador to Afghanistan’s denial that he pressured rival candidates to Karzai to quit the race.
In the Iraq story, Time says the Bushies considered that intervention in the elections was justified as a counter-balance to Iranian resources. Because an election that was unfair when one foreign nation is trying to influence it becomes completely fair when two foreign nations are doing so. And by the way, the reason I put “aid candidates favored by Washington” in quotes is that Iraqis will be voting for parties, not for candidates. The Time piece shows a total ignorance of the electoral system the US foisted on Iraq.
(Update: Juan Cole has made all those points about the Time story at greater length and with greater expertise, although a day later.)
Everybody reports on Turkey’s revision of its criminal justice code, which were largely in a liberal direction in the hopes of getting EU membership. Since that isn’t gonna happen, I worry about what will happen when the day finally comes that Turkey realizes it isn’t gonna happen. Will they re-criminalize adultery? Reinstitute lesser penalties for rape if the man marries his victim and greater ones for rape of a virgin? Probably not, but it would have better had they come to this on their own. Only the Daily Telegraph, that I can find, mentions, in rather vague terms, something about restricting discussion of issues such as the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Wrong for Catholics
Take a quick look at this website:
www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com
Did you notice who paid for it? It’s at the very bottom of the page.
www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com
Did you notice who paid for it? It’s at the very bottom of the page.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
I am nothing to you
In Britain, much of whatever support remaining for the Iraq war dissipated this week because of the videotape from hostage Ken Bigley (pictured), a civil engineer, pleading with Tony Blair for his life. Bigley is the man threatened with execution (the two Americans captured with him have been killed) unless the two women prisoners are released.
He also has an 86-year old mother who collapsed a few days ago.
Blair finally responded publicly, with his own plea to the British public (he evidently had nothing to say to the kidnappers), against compassion (Bigley’s family must have known they were fucked when Blair praised their stoicism): “What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position.” Poor baby. Really, modern media and technology have made it so difficult to ignore suffering. So unfair.
Except that the mirror image (if I may mention older representational technology) of that is that, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, “When history is a string of macabre Kodak moments, those slaughtered off-camera evaporate as if they had never lived. ... On the day Ken Bigley’s video played in millions of British living rooms, 22 people were murdered in Baghdad.”
Similarly, on the day in April when those 4 mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge, with pictures, several US soldiers were also killed, with little fuss. But the crispy critters pictures caused the US to mount another invasion attempt, evidently against the advice of the Marine general in charge of the area. And Rumsfeld ignored the torture at Abu Ghraib, explaining that he didn’t consider it important enough to inform Bush because “The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video.” The “problem,” of course, was very much three-dimensional to the people involved.
Back in May I wrote about the Bushite obsession with images, “like the flight deck landing, the statue toppling and all the other carefully stage-managed moments, as if they’re constantly auditioning for a postage stamp. ... Bush, who is less fixated on words, for obvious reasons, thinks that once he has the right visual, he’s fixed in place the meaning of an event. Ironically, it was the two words Mission Accomplished that really turned Flight Suit Boy’s million-dollar photo op into a sick joke, and it was the photos of the prisoners that made torture into a live issue.”
I am Ken Bigley from Liverpool in the Walton district. I am here in Iraq and I think this is possibly my last chance to speak to someone who will listen from Europe. ... Mr Blair, I am nothing to you, it’s just one person in the whole of the United Kingdom that’s all. With a family like you’ve got a family, with children, like your children, your boys, your wife. Please you can help, I know you can. These people are not asking for the world, they’re asking for their wives and the mothers of their children.Full transcript.
He also has an 86-year old mother who collapsed a few days ago.
Blair finally responded publicly, with his own plea to the British public (he evidently had nothing to say to the kidnappers), against compassion (Bigley’s family must have known they were fucked when Blair praised their stoicism): “What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position.” Poor baby. Really, modern media and technology have made it so difficult to ignore suffering. So unfair.
Except that the mirror image (if I may mention older representational technology) of that is that, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, “When history is a string of macabre Kodak moments, those slaughtered off-camera evaporate as if they had never lived. ... On the day Ken Bigley’s video played in millions of British living rooms, 22 people were murdered in Baghdad.”
Similarly, on the day in April when those 4 mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge, with pictures, several US soldiers were also killed, with little fuss. But the crispy critters pictures caused the US to mount another invasion attempt, evidently against the advice of the Marine general in charge of the area. And Rumsfeld ignored the torture at Abu Ghraib, explaining that he didn’t consider it important enough to inform Bush because “The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video.” The “problem,” of course, was very much three-dimensional to the people involved.
Back in May I wrote about the Bushite obsession with images, “like the flight deck landing, the statue toppling and all the other carefully stage-managed moments, as if they’re constantly auditioning for a postage stamp. ... Bush, who is less fixated on words, for obvious reasons, thinks that once he has the right visual, he’s fixed in place the meaning of an event. Ironically, it was the two words Mission Accomplished that really turned Flight Suit Boy’s million-dollar photo op into a sick joke, and it was the photos of the prisoners that made torture into a live issue.”
Strong
In the last couple of days, Bush has several times referred to both Tony Blair and Wowie Allawi as “strong” prime ministers. What does that actually mean? In terms of ability to control events, both are Bush’s sock pockets, so that’s not it. They have strong handshakes? Strong convictions, I suppose is what he intends, although it could just be another of those phrases with no particular meaning he uses because he thinks it sounds good. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test.
Maureen Dowd on the Bill Maher show: “Kerry gives nuance a bad name.”
3 years ago, the Italian supreme court, a collection of elderly men which exists, as far as this blog is concerned (see here, here, here, here, here and here) to issue stupid rulings about sex, issued one which said that patting a woman’s bottom did not constitute sexual harassment. It has now reversed this in the case of a magistrate who patted the butts of three...supreme court employees.
In the few days since Putin announced his plan to appoint all 89 governors himself, at least 10 have joined his “United Party.” Can you say one-party state?
Speaking of democracy at work, the elders of an Afghan Pashtun tribe, the Terezays, rule that if anyone votes for someone other than Karzai, their houses will be burned down. This ruling was broadcast on radio.
After stone-walling for several days, the Republican Party fesses up to mailing out those leaflets in Arkansas & W. Virginia saying that the D’s would ban the Bible and promote gay marriage. Next question: how many were sent out?
Maureen Dowd on the Bill Maher show: “Kerry gives nuance a bad name.”
3 years ago, the Italian supreme court, a collection of elderly men which exists, as far as this blog is concerned (see here, here, here, here, here and here) to issue stupid rulings about sex, issued one which said that patting a woman’s bottom did not constitute sexual harassment. It has now reversed this in the case of a magistrate who patted the butts of three...supreme court employees.
In the few days since Putin announced his plan to appoint all 89 governors himself, at least 10 have joined his “United Party.” Can you say one-party state?
Speaking of democracy at work, the elders of an Afghan Pashtun tribe, the Terezays, rule that if anyone votes for someone other than Karzai, their houses will be burned down. This ruling was broadcast on radio.
After stone-walling for several days, the Republican Party fesses up to mailing out those leaflets in Arkansas & W. Virginia saying that the D’s would ban the Bible and promote gay marriage. Next question: how many were sent out?
Friday, September 24, 2004
In which my presidential ambitions are quashed
Bush complains that Kerry “chose to criticize the Prime Minister of Iraq. ... You can’t lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.” I didn’t realize that America’s choice of its own president was subject to veto by the guy Bush picked to pretend to run Iraq (oops, I just questioned Comical Allawi’s credibility, I guess that means I can’t be president now either).
Matthew Yglesias of American Prospect suggests that Bush’s postponing of the military push in Iraq we all know is coming until after the US and before the Iraqi elections will make that campaign all the bloodier. “The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists.”
I may have been unduly alarmist about the security legislation before the Duma. Yesterday it rejected a bill banning reporting on hostage-taking incidents until they are over. We’ll see.
Matthew Yglesias of American Prospect suggests that Bush’s postponing of the military push in Iraq we all know is coming until after the US and before the Iraqi elections will make that campaign all the bloodier. “The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists.”
I may have been unduly alarmist about the security legislation before the Duma. Yesterday it rejected a bill banning reporting on hostage-taking incidents until they are over. We’ll see.
Unambiguous
There are 2 initiatives on the Cal. ballot relating to casinos. California being California, the commercials against one of them attack it for threatening to make our morals worse. Did I say morals? I meant traffic.
Turkmenistan’s president-for-life-or-until-the-men-with-the-butterfly-nets-catch-up-to-him-whichever-comes-first Saparmurat Niyazov preempted programming on all tv channels so that he could read his poetry to the nation for an hour and a half. When was the last time Bush did that?
The Russian foreign minister reassured the UN yesterday: “President Vladimir Putin has stated unambiguously that Russia will remain a democratic state.” See, and you were worried about Russia not being democratic, but Putin has decreed that it is and Putin’s word is law in Russia, to be followed absolutely. Aren’t you reassured? If not, Putin will crush you like an ant.
Turkmenistan’s president-for-life-or-until-the-men-with-the-butterfly-nets-catch-up-to-him-whichever-comes-first Saparmurat Niyazov preempted programming on all tv channels so that he could read his poetry to the nation for an hour and a half. When was the last time Bush did that?
The Russian foreign minister reassured the UN yesterday: “President Vladimir Putin has stated unambiguously that Russia will remain a democratic state.” See, and you were worried about Russia not being democratic, but Putin has decreed that it is and Putin’s word is law in Russia, to be followed absolutely. Aren’t you reassured? If not, Putin will crush you like an ant.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Nothing’s perfect in life
The first episode of the new radio series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available now on the BBC website. NOTE: that episode will disappear from the site a week from today, replaced by episode 2, and so on, so don’t procrastinate.
Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.
Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.
Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.
Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.
We’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq
I read the transcript of Bush’s press conference with “Comical Allawi”, so you don’t have to.
Addressing Zowie Allawi: “Mr. Prime Minister, America will stand with you until freedom and justice have prevailed.” Man, are his legs gonna be tired. “the vast majority of Iraqis remain committed to democracy.” Of course since there is no democracy in Iraq, it’s just guesswork what “the vast majority of Iraqis” are committed to.
Asked “Why haven’t U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al Zarqawi, who’s blamed for much of the violence?”, Bush responded: “We’re looking for him. He hides.” That explains that.
“Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong.” I quote that because it bugs me that the man has less grasp of verb tenses than the average 5 year old (but then, whoever did the transcript for the White House doesn’t quite get the it’s/its distinction).
GeeDubya, naturally, flounders badly in response to several of the questions, including my second favorite question: “If General Abizaid says he needs more troops and the Prime Minister says he does not want more troops, who wins?” Bush: “Obviously, we can work this out. It’s in the -- if our commanders on the ground feels it’s in the interest of the Iraq citizens to provide more troops, we’ll talk about it. That’s -- that’s why -- they’re friends; that’s what we do about friends.”
He takes back the comment of a few days ago that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in July by the CGA (Central Guessing Agency) was just a “guess.” “I should have used ‘estimate.’” Yeah, it’s a three-syllable word, we all understand that’s beyond your comfort level. “But what’s important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister.” Later, he added, “One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi Prime Minister.” Reminds me of his comment a while back that he never reads newspapers because he gets the real facts from Condi and Andy Card.
A reporter asked Bush about his comment that there was only a “handful” of people trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. He said, “Well, it’s a handful if you happen to have several thousand fingers.” OK, he didn’t say that.
Somebody asked a really good, important question, which I’ll paraphrase: When you talk about mixed messages being bad, do you mean if Kerry is elected, or do you mean right now. Bush filibustered for a really long time and didn’t come within a mile of answering.
And there’s the quote the blogosphere likes so much: “we’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq.” Yeah, you definitely don’t want suiciders driving. Remember that scene in Annie Hall with Christopher Walken driving Woody Allen?
Addressing Zowie Allawi: “Mr. Prime Minister, America will stand with you until freedom and justice have prevailed.” Man, are his legs gonna be tired. “the vast majority of Iraqis remain committed to democracy.” Of course since there is no democracy in Iraq, it’s just guesswork what “the vast majority of Iraqis” are committed to.
Asked “Why haven’t U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al Zarqawi, who’s blamed for much of the violence?”, Bush responded: “We’re looking for him. He hides.” That explains that.
“Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong.” I quote that because it bugs me that the man has less grasp of verb tenses than the average 5 year old (but then, whoever did the transcript for the White House doesn’t quite get the it’s/its distinction).
GeeDubya, naturally, flounders badly in response to several of the questions, including my second favorite question: “If General Abizaid says he needs more troops and the Prime Minister says he does not want more troops, who wins?” Bush: “Obviously, we can work this out. It’s in the -- if our commanders on the ground feels it’s in the interest of the Iraq citizens to provide more troops, we’ll talk about it. That’s -- that’s why -- they’re friends; that’s what we do about friends.”
He takes back the comment of a few days ago that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in July by the CGA (Central Guessing Agency) was just a “guess.” “I should have used ‘estimate.’” Yeah, it’s a three-syllable word, we all understand that’s beyond your comfort level. “But what’s important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister.” Later, he added, “One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi Prime Minister.” Reminds me of his comment a while back that he never reads newspapers because he gets the real facts from Condi and Andy Card.
A reporter asked Bush about his comment that there was only a “handful” of people trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. He said, “Well, it’s a handful if you happen to have several thousand fingers.” OK, he didn’t say that.
Somebody asked a really good, important question, which I’ll paraphrase: When you talk about mixed messages being bad, do you mean if Kerry is elected, or do you mean right now. Bush filibustered for a really long time and didn’t come within a mile of answering.
And there’s the quote the blogosphere likes so much: “we’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq.” Yeah, you definitely don’t want suiciders driving. Remember that scene in Annie Hall with Christopher Walken driving Woody Allen?
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Attack of the terrorist cats
The Moscow police have arrested more than 10,000 of the usual suspects in response to Beslan, according to the Link, but I think it'll expire tomorrow.) The “Great Terror” of 2004 begins. Proposals include: Soviet-type resident registration (which was supposedly abolished by Yeltsin, but local governments just ignored it), restrictions on media coverage of terrorist actions, restrictions on cars, the ability of the Kremlin to declare a state of war in event of a terrorist attack, thereby suspending civil rights, etc. The Duma rejected proposals to discuss the government’s Chechen policy and to ask Putin and the security chiefs to explain their actions.
In other words, just like the US, where the Republicans are planning to tighten up on identification cards, border controls, etc. Next step, no doubt: internal passports.
The Iraqi terrorist-types are just making up demands at random now. When they demanded the release of all women prisoners, did they even know there were just two? What I enjoyed, especially after the story in today’s WaPo asserting with a straight face that the Iraqis were in charge of pretty much everything now, was watching them prepare the way to meet the demands, claiming, also with a straight face, that by an amazing coincidence the two were just about to be released anyway, and then to have the Americans put their foot down.
The Telegraph’s News in Brief section today contains the following stories: “Woman Crushed by 6ft Crucifix” (in Italy); “Man Mistook Wife for a Monkey” (and shot her to death; Malaysia); “Wife Asks for Weekly Beating” (in an Iranian court; as opposed to daily: “‘I don’t want a divorce. My husband is violent. It is in his nature. I just want him to promise to beat me only once a week,’ she told the judge, who burst out laughing.”
From the Press Association, a wonderfully silly headline for an unwonderfully silly action by the FBI: “Cat Refused Entry for Hamas Support.”
Terrorist cats. Don’t tell the Duma.
In other words, just like the US, where the Republicans are planning to tighten up on identification cards, border controls, etc. Next step, no doubt: internal passports.
The Iraqi terrorist-types are just making up demands at random now. When they demanded the release of all women prisoners, did they even know there were just two? What I enjoyed, especially after the story in today’s WaPo asserting with a straight face that the Iraqis were in charge of pretty much everything now, was watching them prepare the way to meet the demands, claiming, also with a straight face, that by an amazing coincidence the two were just about to be released anyway, and then to have the Americans put their foot down.
The Telegraph’s News in Brief section today contains the following stories: “Woman Crushed by 6ft Crucifix” (in Italy); “Man Mistook Wife for a Monkey” (and shot her to death; Malaysia); “Wife Asks for Weekly Beating” (in an Iranian court; as opposed to daily: “‘I don’t want a divorce. My husband is violent. It is in his nature. I just want him to promise to beat me only once a week,’ she told the judge, who burst out laughing.”
From the Press Association, a wonderfully silly headline for an unwonderfully silly action by the FBI: “Cat Refused Entry for Hamas Support.”
Terrorist cats. Don’t tell the Duma.
The right to enrichment
President Khatami defends Iran’s uranium enrichment program: “We clearly demand that our right to enrichment be recognized by the international community”. Who says Iran’s government doesn’t believe in rights?
Kerry didn’t like Bush’s scolding speech to the UN yesterday: “The President of the United States stood before the stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq.” Kerry, whose own face is less expressive than those on Mt Rushmore, then went on to accuse Al Gore of being boring, and Dukakis of being a crappy campaigner. Stony-faced, indeed.
Responding to Kerry’s comments, Scotty McClellan today, and Bush yesterday, referred to him as “continuing his pattern of twisting in the wind”--are we supposed not to notice when Bush and his henchmen use identical phrasing? Also, not to get all William Safire on y’all, but they’re not even using that expression correctly.
Kerry didn’t like Bush’s scolding speech to the UN yesterday: “The President of the United States stood before the stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq.” Kerry, whose own face is less expressive than those on Mt Rushmore, then went on to accuse Al Gore of being boring, and Dukakis of being a crappy campaigner. Stony-faced, indeed.
Responding to Kerry’s comments, Scotty McClellan today, and Bush yesterday, referred to him as “continuing his pattern of twisting in the wind”--are we supposed not to notice when Bush and his henchmen use identical phrasing? Also, not to get all William Safire on y’all, but they’re not even using that expression correctly.
Details matter
We talk of “democracy” and “elections” as if there was one model, as if the terms were unproblematic, but the details matter.
Charles de Gaulle knew this. When he graciously accepted the offer to become dictator of France in 1958 to save it from a military coup (Pakistan’s Musharraf cited de Gaulle this week as his role model), one of his conditions was that the electoral law be rewritten. Rather than proportional representation in which parties were given seats in accordance with their share of the votes, there would be a run-off system, favoring the right, which could sink its differences in the second round. Result at the next election: the Gaullists, with 18% of the vote, got 40% of the seats, and the Communists, with 19% of the vote, got 2% of the seats. Both the pre- and post-1958 systems were forms of representative democracy, but geared towards generating different results.
The elections in Iraq will be based on a form of proportional representation based on party lists. Something like Putin wants in Russia, actually. PR is good for the representation of minorities, which is good for countries like the Netherlands where politics are based on ideas and ideology, but in a country like Iraq, divided by ethnicity and religion, it is good in that it ensures some representation of, for example, the Kurds, but bad in that it encourages politics to remain divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The real point of this form of election is that voters do not select individual candidates (which should cut down on the number of assassinations), and MPs will not represent geographic constituencies. There will be no representative of, say, Fallujah; votes will be counted on a national basis. So if participation is uneven across the country, if no one at all votes in Fallujah, if--oh fuck it--WHEN the election is a failure in real-world democratic terms, this electoral system will gloss that over. There won’t be any vacant seats; rather, the system will just give more political weight to areas not in rebellion, or where more fraudulent votes are created.
It also won’t effect the system if candidates do get assassinated. Unlike Afghanistan, where if any of the presidential candidates get offed, the election would be postponed 3 months. The candidates, you’ll be surprised to hear, aren’t doing a lot of whistle-stop tours.
Charles de Gaulle knew this. When he graciously accepted the offer to become dictator of France in 1958 to save it from a military coup (Pakistan’s Musharraf cited de Gaulle this week as his role model), one of his conditions was that the electoral law be rewritten. Rather than proportional representation in which parties were given seats in accordance with their share of the votes, there would be a run-off system, favoring the right, which could sink its differences in the second round. Result at the next election: the Gaullists, with 18% of the vote, got 40% of the seats, and the Communists, with 19% of the vote, got 2% of the seats. Both the pre- and post-1958 systems were forms of representative democracy, but geared towards generating different results.
The elections in Iraq will be based on a form of proportional representation based on party lists. Something like Putin wants in Russia, actually. PR is good for the representation of minorities, which is good for countries like the Netherlands where politics are based on ideas and ideology, but in a country like Iraq, divided by ethnicity and religion, it is good in that it ensures some representation of, for example, the Kurds, but bad in that it encourages politics to remain divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The real point of this form of election is that voters do not select individual candidates (which should cut down on the number of assassinations), and MPs will not represent geographic constituencies. There will be no representative of, say, Fallujah; votes will be counted on a national basis. So if participation is uneven across the country, if no one at all votes in Fallujah, if--oh fuck it--WHEN the election is a failure in real-world democratic terms, this electoral system will gloss that over. There won’t be any vacant seats; rather, the system will just give more political weight to areas not in rebellion, or where more fraudulent votes are created.
It also won’t effect the system if candidates do get assassinated. Unlike Afghanistan, where if any of the presidential candidates get offed, the election would be postponed 3 months. The candidates, you’ll be surprised to hear, aren’t doing a lot of whistle-stop tours.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Made up to be seen from 30 feet away
Raymond Chandler described one of his characters this way: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” George Bush’s pronouncements are increasingly just a collection of words he likes, formed into things that look like sentences from 30 feet away, but which dissolve into nonsense if you look even a little more closely at them: “Iraqi citizens are seeing a determined effort by responsible citizens to lead to a more hopeful tomorrow, and I am optimistic we’ll succeed.”
Kerry’s new position on Iraq (yeah, I know, I sound like Bush when I say that, but it really is a new position) is that if Bush hadn’t cut off the UN inspections process prematurely, it would have shown that Iraq had no WMDs, and that fact being made public, by itself, would somehow have caused Saddam Hussein to fall, because his regime was based on his having WMDs. Oh, I don’t think so.
Kerry’s new position on Iraq (yeah, I know, I sound like Bush when I say that, but it really is a new position) is that if Bush hadn’t cut off the UN inspections process prematurely, it would have shown that Iraq had no WMDs, and that fact being made public, by itself, would somehow have caused Saddam Hussein to fall, because his regime was based on his having WMDs. Oh, I don’t think so.
Renaissance Man
So whatever happened to those French hostages, now that the ban on headscarves has gone into effect?
And whatever happened to Saddam’s doubles?
Musharraf says that he’ll renege on his promise to step down as army chief because that would end the national “renaissance” in Pakistan. ‘Cuz you know how the quality of Florence’s paintings and sculpture declined after Cesare Borgia stopped wearing camouflage uniforms.
The US will sell Israel 500 missiles which could be used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (the story has mysteriously vanished from the Ha’aretz website).
And whatever happened to Saddam’s doubles?
Musharraf says that he’ll renege on his promise to step down as army chief because that would end the national “renaissance” in Pakistan. ‘Cuz you know how the quality of Florence’s paintings and sculpture declined after Cesare Borgia stopped wearing camouflage uniforms.
The US will sell Israel 500 missiles which could be used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (the story has mysteriously vanished from the Ha’aretz website).
Beware the ides of the march of democracy
A must-read in the Guardian suggests that the NATO war on Yugoslavia was in large part about opening the country to takeover by multinational corporations, states that the bombing campaign targeted state-owned industries while leaving privately owned ones alone, and that the UN administration in Kosovo is now selling off the provinces state-owned enterprises, which are surely not the UN’s to sell.
Bush keeps talking about the “march” of democracy. The evidence is against him:
Bush keeps talking about the “march” of democracy. The evidence is against him:
- The leading opposition candidate for president in Ukraine’s elections next month is now in the hospital with a mysterious case of poisoning.
- In Kazakhstan’s elections, the dictator Nazarbayev’s party comes in first, and the not-exactly-opposition party led by his daughter comes in second.
- Indonesia’s presidential elections are won by (retired) general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (remember when Indonesian rulers only had one name? and not silly ones like Bambang), just 6 years after the end of more than 30 years of military rule.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Kerrycaterwauling
Why don’t you all read the transcript of Kerry’s speech, so I don’t have to?
Oh, all right. Some of it, quoted below, constitutes the best rhetoric I’ve heard yet from Kerry (actually, I’ve only read it so far, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good when I hear it in Kerry’s own irritating voice).
On the one hand, it’s a strong indictment of Bush’s failures and misjudgements, but on the other hand he says that he’ll fight the same crusade, but do it better. “The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” You’ll note he never defines “the terrorists,” so it’s a little hard to tell who all these people are he plans to “destroy.”
“To win, America must be strong.” Check. “And America must be smart.” Uh oh.
“His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.”
“The President now admits to ‘miscalculations’ in Iraq. That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.” This line is almost too clever, or needed a bridging sentence; it took me a second to realize that the bit about “accounting errors” was a criticism of Bush’s use of the word “miscalculations” to minimize his own incompetence.
He quotes the Republicans (McCain, Lugar, Hagel) now criticizing Bush’s Iraq policy in order to deflect the charge that his own criticisms are partisan, without adding that McCain (not sure about the other 2) wants a massive attack on Fallujah.
And Kerry’s own ideas for Iraq are anemic: get other countries to give aid, bribe them with shares in Iraq’s oil industry in exchange for sending troops. Turn the page. A fresh start. A lot about dealing with Europeans, not a lot about how to deal with the Iraqis, except training a lot more of them to be soldiers.
Oh, all right. Some of it, quoted below, constitutes the best rhetoric I’ve heard yet from Kerry (actually, I’ve only read it so far, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good when I hear it in Kerry’s own irritating voice).
On the one hand, it’s a strong indictment of Bush’s failures and misjudgements, but on the other hand he says that he’ll fight the same crusade, but do it better. “The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” You’ll note he never defines “the terrorists,” so it’s a little hard to tell who all these people are he plans to “destroy.”
“To win, America must be strong.” Check. “And America must be smart.” Uh oh.
“His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.”
“The President now admits to ‘miscalculations’ in Iraq. That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.” This line is almost too clever, or needed a bridging sentence; it took me a second to realize that the bit about “accounting errors” was a criticism of Bush’s use of the word “miscalculations” to minimize his own incompetence.
He quotes the Republicans (McCain, Lugar, Hagel) now criticizing Bush’s Iraq policy in order to deflect the charge that his own criticisms are partisan, without adding that McCain (not sure about the other 2) wants a massive attack on Fallujah.
And Kerry’s own ideas for Iraq are anemic: get other countries to give aid, bribe them with shares in Iraq’s oil industry in exchange for sending troops. Turn the page. A fresh start. A lot about dealing with Europeans, not a lot about how to deal with the Iraqis, except training a lot more of them to be soldiers.
Rummyrantings
I read transcripts of Secretary of War “Rummy” Rumsfeld’s “media availabilities,” so you don’t have to.
Rumsfeld: “At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed.” Didn’t we say that about the Vietnamese?
Rummy also threatens to take back the cities and regions that have become “sanctuaries” for “people who are determined to overthrow the Iraqi government, the legitimate Iraqi government.” Someone needs to get that man a dictionary, if he thinks that places which are bombed every single day are sanctuaries, and that there is a “legitimate” government in Iraq.
Rummy is asked about Seymour Hersh’s book on Abu Ghrab (which I’m now reading). Given that he never bothered reading the Taguba report, it won’t come as a surprise that he hasn’t read Hersh’s book (the DOD transcript misspell’s Hersh’s name), but shits on it anyway.
He also praises the voter registration drive in Afghanistan for registering more people than are eligible to vote, which you’d think would be embarrassing, but Rummy does not know the meaning of the word embarrassing (or sanctuary, or legitimate, etc etc), and that 41% of them are women (or one guy in a burqa who registered 4.2 million times).
Rumsfeld: “At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed.” Didn’t we say that about the Vietnamese?
Rummy also threatens to take back the cities and regions that have become “sanctuaries” for “people who are determined to overthrow the Iraqi government, the legitimate Iraqi government.” Someone needs to get that man a dictionary, if he thinks that places which are bombed every single day are sanctuaries, and that there is a “legitimate” government in Iraq.
Rummy is asked about Seymour Hersh’s book on Abu Ghrab (which I’m now reading). Given that he never bothered reading the Taguba report, it won’t come as a surprise that he hasn’t read Hersh’s book (the DOD transcript misspell’s Hersh’s name), but shits on it anyway.
He also praises the voter registration drive in Afghanistan for registering more people than are eligible to vote, which you’d think would be embarrassing, but Rummy does not know the meaning of the word embarrassing (or sanctuary, or legitimate, etc etc), and that 41% of them are women (or one guy in a burqa who registered 4.2 million times).
More weight, more weight
Tony Blair declares war, again. “Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam, in this conflict now taking place in Iraq, this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be decided. Either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat.” So if you didn’t like the “first conflict,” we’ll just keep rebranding it until we find one you’ll like. New Coke anyone?
German voters in the East (Saxony & Brandenburg) vote in large numbers for neo-Nazis to punish the hapless Social Democratic government’s scaling back of social programs. In Saxony, the National Democratic Party, which hadn’t had any legislative presence since 1968, almost matches the vote of the SPD. German governments of both major parties have really badly served the East Germans, so their limited commitment, 15 years after unification, to a political system that largely ignores them is understandable, but still creepy.
German voters in the East (Saxony & Brandenburg) vote in large numbers for neo-Nazis to punish the hapless Social Democratic government’s scaling back of social programs. In Saxony, the National Democratic Party, which hadn’t had any legislative presence since 1968, almost matches the vote of the SPD. German governments of both major parties have really badly served the East Germans, so their limited commitment, 15 years after unification, to a political system that largely ignores them is understandable, but still creepy.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Desperate
How often have we heard from American officials that increasing Resistance activity in Iraq is a sign of their desperation? Now Puppet PM “Comical” Allawi has made the same argument--“getting more desperate...last stand...we are winning...Iraq is fighting this war on behalf of the civilized nations...yadda yadda yadda.” This is an astonishingly stale piece of rhetoric, unchanged by as much as a syllable in over a year. In fact, Bush gave the same speech over a year ago; on 8/27/03 I called it a “massively silly argument”: “Yeah, it’s a sign of desperation if they attack us, a sign of boldness and resolve if we attack them, yeah yeah yeah. ... It’s the last gasp of a dying regime, it’s an all-out war for the security of the US and what Bush calls ‘civilization.’ It’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.” It may or may not be the last gasp, but it’s an incredibly long one. You have to be impressed by their breath control.
Fontgate followup: An WaPo article on how CBS got the Killian memos wrong says they failed to test their authenticity adequately because the White House wasn’t challenging their authenticity. This lends credence to the “conspiracy theory” that the Mayberry Machiavellis created this trap for CBS to walk into. Yeah, it was criminally careless, but you can see why they wouldn’t spend a lot of effort checking out a piece of evidence no one was disputing.
Here in California, Gubna Ahnuuld, who must be one of the top 10 richest people in the state, has vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, because if $6.75 an hour is good enough for the guy whose job it is to lick Arnie’s Hummer clean every day...
Fontgate followup: An WaPo article on how CBS got the Killian memos wrong says they failed to test their authenticity adequately because the White House wasn’t challenging their authenticity. This lends credence to the “conspiracy theory” that the Mayberry Machiavellis created this trap for CBS to walk into. Yeah, it was criminally careless, but you can see why they wouldn’t spend a lot of effort checking out a piece of evidence no one was disputing.
Here in California, Gubna Ahnuuld, who must be one of the top 10 richest people in the state, has vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, because if $6.75 an hour is good enough for the guy whose job it is to lick Arnie’s Hummer clean every day...
If every day could be Tet
There is worry in Iraq of coordinated attacks breaching the Green Zone; the talk is of something like the Tet Offensive. And in Afghanistan too, the American ambassador has been warning of a possible, guess what, Tet Offensive in the cities in the period leading up to the Afghan presidential elections next month. It’s like having Christmas every day, only with Tet. Which is the day when an American soldier sticks his head out of his armored personnel carrier, and if he shoots at his own shadow, there’ll be another year of guerilla warfare and military quagmire. If his shadow shoots back, two years.
Older Viet Cong are complaining that Tet used to be about peace and love and smashing imperialism, but now it’s being commercialized by the greeting card industry.
The Afghan Tet fears are reported in the Indy which says that Karzai “is widely expected to be re-elected.” Of course, Karzai was never actually elected, at least not by the Afghan people. Still, this is a phrase I expect to hear and read often.
Speaking about the Baghdad branch of Tet Offensive, Inc., Under-Secretary of State Richard “The Giraffe” Armitage: “We never thought it would be easy; we do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections.” Never thought it would be easy. Never FUCKING thought it would be fucking easy. Sure you didn’t.
When they established a hard, inflexible deadline for the fake “hand-over of power” in Iraq in June, the Bushies left many hostages to fate. And then they repeated the mistake with inflexible timing of elections in January 2005, no matter how unprepared and chaotic the country is. So vast resources are now being diverted to those farcical elections. With daily kidnappings and car bombs, soldiers and police will now have to protect election offices and workers--“I’m gonna try and register that guy--cover me!” And new offences are being planned for Fallujah and elsewhere so that not too many areas will have to be excluded from the voting, to give a tiny amount of legitimacy to elections held during a civil war and under foreign occupation. 3 point something billion dollars was just diverted to security from projects to restore sewerage and electricity, and now security personnel are being diverted from real security to this piece of play-acting.
The NYT has a story on this, which seems to be drawn from a single anonymous source, so you know it must be true. The source, an American commander, is confident that the upcoming siege of Fallujah will go so much better than the last 3, because “this time...unlike in April, there was a sovereign Iraqi government, and one that seemed willing to absorb the political storm that such an assault was likely to set off.” A government willing to support an attack on its country’s population is a GOOD thing?
White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan implied this week that Kamp Kerry is behind the Killian documents: “It’s our position that there are orchestrated attacks going on by the Democrats and Kerry campaign to tear down the President because they are falling behind in the polls.” Speaking of orchestrated attacks: McClellan’s salary is still being paid by the American taxpayers, of all political parties, and not by the Republican Party, right?
Older Viet Cong are complaining that Tet used to be about peace and love and smashing imperialism, but now it’s being commercialized by the greeting card industry.
The Afghan Tet fears are reported in the Indy which says that Karzai “is widely expected to be re-elected.” Of course, Karzai was never actually elected, at least not by the Afghan people. Still, this is a phrase I expect to hear and read often.
Speaking about the Baghdad branch of Tet Offensive, Inc., Under-Secretary of State Richard “The Giraffe” Armitage: “We never thought it would be easy; we do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections.” Never thought it would be easy. Never FUCKING thought it would be fucking easy. Sure you didn’t.
When they established a hard, inflexible deadline for the fake “hand-over of power” in Iraq in June, the Bushies left many hostages to fate. And then they repeated the mistake with inflexible timing of elections in January 2005, no matter how unprepared and chaotic the country is. So vast resources are now being diverted to those farcical elections. With daily kidnappings and car bombs, soldiers and police will now have to protect election offices and workers--“I’m gonna try and register that guy--cover me!” And new offences are being planned for Fallujah and elsewhere so that not too many areas will have to be excluded from the voting, to give a tiny amount of legitimacy to elections held during a civil war and under foreign occupation. 3 point something billion dollars was just diverted to security from projects to restore sewerage and electricity, and now security personnel are being diverted from real security to this piece of play-acting.
The NYT has a story on this, which seems to be drawn from a single anonymous source, so you know it must be true. The source, an American commander, is confident that the upcoming siege of Fallujah will go so much better than the last 3, because “this time...unlike in April, there was a sovereign Iraqi government, and one that seemed willing to absorb the political storm that such an assault was likely to set off.” A government willing to support an attack on its country’s population is a GOOD thing?
White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan implied this week that Kamp Kerry is behind the Killian documents: “It’s our position that there are orchestrated attacks going on by the Democrats and Kerry campaign to tear down the President because they are falling behind in the polls.” Speaking of orchestrated attacks: McClellan’s salary is still being paid by the American taxpayers, of all political parties, and not by the Republican Party, right?
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